So this is it. Match point for eternity.

When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.

I'm not a God, I make mistakes.

Where do you go when you're the best in the world? What's next?

I don't really care what the man on the street thinks. I never did anything to please him in the first place, and I'm not going to start now.

Tennis is a psychological sport, you have to keep a clear head. That is why I stopped playing.

I go to London, my favourite city in the world, and I feel at home.

How do you build a relationship when you've hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don't see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?

So this is it. Match point for eternity.

The suit-and-tie job is very nice but it's not really who I am in my heart.

I believed in raising my children as I had been raised.

It's silly to say it about a tennis player, but I'm an unbelievable hero in Germany. And Germany needs heroes more than any place.

For a year, I had all sorts of weirdos coming on to me.

I lost in the second round of the French Open and had 10 days off. I went to the Hard Rock Cafe. It was exciting to be away from my parents, to stay in a hotel. Hotels at 17 meant freedom.

When you are thrown onto the stage at 17 in such an enormous way, it becomes living on the edge because every step you take, every word you speak, every action you do becomes headline news. And it became, for me, life or death.

It was a confusing time in my life, a really bad day at the office.

Girls had never been important. I'd had a girlfriend or two and had liked them a lot but it wasn't love, because my first love was tennis.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it's about the stories; it's about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people's privacy.

The eyes of some of the fans at Davis Cup matches scare me. There's no light in them. Fixed emotions. Blind worship. Horror. It makes me think of what happened to us long ago.

I go to my favourite tournament, I talk about my favourite sport and it's just a great month of parading.

I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.

That's the hard part about sport: as men we haven't started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.

Does anyone ask their parents how they are conceived?

I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all I Love to play.

I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.

I believe that everything in life happens for a reason.

I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn't thinking about the big picture. I didn't notice what they said on television, I wasn't reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.

If I go into a club now, all the blonde girls leave my corner and all the black girls come into my corner. It's as if I'm racist towards white girls!

I can't change history, I don't want to change history. I can only change the future. I'm working on that.

A few years after my first son was born, he wanted to know how we chose his name, so I began reading him the story of Noah's Ark.

I don't know how many millions of photographs have been taken of me.

Tennis is a psychological sport you have to keep a clear head. That is why I stopped playing.

The fifth set is not about tennis its about nerves.

I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all I love to play.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

We don't have an eternity to realize our dreams, only the time we are here.

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there - even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

I was born in 1961. Now I think the 16 years that elapsed between 1961 and the end of the wars is nothing. To a child growing up it felt like an eternity, an entirely different world.

War is eternity jammed into frantic minutes that will fill a lifetime with dreams and nightmares.

Death is the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

The realm of immediate or personal knowledge is a narrow circle in which these bodies move; the realm of knowledge derived through faith is as wide as the universe, and old as eternity.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. The present is the only time there is.

Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.