"Once you begin to take yourself seriously..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf

“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

“You have been in every way all that anyone could be.... If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.”

“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.”

“I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.”

“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”

“We all are imbued with the love of praise.”

“People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.”

“There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.”

“The soul of this man is his clothes.”