My suspension was a long-planned move. . . and was done to protect would-be convicts in Romanian politics.
I play each point like my life depends on it.
The glory is being happy. The glory is not winning here or winning there. The glory is enjoying practicing, enjoy every day, enjoying to work hard, trying to be a better player than before.
Losing is not my enemy. . fear of losing is my enemy.
The only way of finding a solution is to fight back, to move, to run, and to control that pressure.
If somebody says I am better than Roger, I think this person doesn't know anything about tennis.
When one player is better than you, at this moment, the only thing you can do is work, try to find solutions and try to wait a little bit for your time. I'm going to wait and I'm going to try a sixth time. And if the sixth doesn't happen, a seventh. It's going to be like this. That's the spirit of sport.
My mantra about everything that has to do with public policy is: identify and reject the false choice.
A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.
But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.
I bought a Ferrari. . . and then sold it after a couple of months.