I did always dream of being a professional player. I think every kid does dream of being a pro, but to last the journey you have to love tennis as a sport and if you are lucky enough to make it in the pros, it is really a bonus.
Since I was like eight, I always wanted to be playing pro tennis.
I got to one Grand Slam final, and that's what you shoot for as a player.
When I was a kid in Adelaide, I dreamed of becoming No. 1 in the world, winning a grand slam and the Davis Cup for Australia.
My dream was always, when I was a little girl, to be number one and to win grand slams as the number one.
When you play Futures and Challengers for three, four years, you're playing in obscurity. You play the game for other reasons. You don't play the game for money or attention. You play the game because you like to play. You play the game because you enjoy the journey.
Winning a Grand Slam was something I was chasing the first day I became a coach.
I always dreamed of playing a night match on Arthur Ashe Stadium. It's a dream come true for me.
I knew I was going to play pro tennis when I was 12.
I did interviews with tennis greats, like James Blake and John Isner. I also interviewed tennis pros who aren't well - known but who made all the same sacrifices but had just a little spark of a professional career and are now still orbiting the sport, either as a teaching pro or a coach.
You want to try and win as many slams as possible in your career. As a tennis player, that's what we always dream of as a kid, wanting to play slams, wanting to win them.
Playing in a main draw Grand Slam is something you dream about as a kid.
I just could never have imagined that I would be mentioned with Chris Evert or with Martina Navratilova, because I was just a kid with a dream and a racquet. Living in Compton, you know, this never happened before.
If you want to win a Grand Slam, when you dream, you say, 'I want Serena in the final.'
There are not a lot of people in the world that get to say they get to walk through the gates of Wimbledon and play on Centre Court. It's pretty phenomenal, and we're very lucky to live this life that we do.
If I was the type of person who had tennis, tennis, tennis all the time and I went to bed and ended up dreaming about tennis, I would go nuts.
In tennis, a lot of parents are accused of driving their kids into tennis. I would say I'm the opposite: I drove my parents into it. They didn't take it that seriously until I was about 11 or 12 years old, when they realised I had an opportunity to go pro.
I'm trying to enjoy my lie as much as I can and I know that tennis hopefully is going to be my life the next 10, 15 years.
I think I can win a slam. That's my main goal, and if I could choose one, then yes, it would have to be Wimbledon. But, honestly, I would take any one of them.
Every time I hit the ball I would pretend I was on that magical court at Wimbledon. And then every time I went to sleep at night I would dream about playing at Wimbledon one day.
I really believe that I can be the No 1, but for that to happen, I probably need to win a couple of grand slams, and they are not going to fall from the sky.
