In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to?

I hope not too much on them. Well, really, we have to concentrate on the grim emergencies, and when we have solved them, we shall be in a position to deal with the future of the world in a manner to give the best results, and the most lasting results, for the common peoples of all the lands. But one has only a certain amount of life and strength, and only so many hours in the day, and other emergencies press upon us too much to be drawn into those very, very complicated, tangled, and not in all cases attractive jungles.

the colonel said I shouldn't tell them how the neutrons work and all the details because we want to keep things separate, so just tell them what to do to keep it safe.

And that’s what’s given us the ability to say no. It’s one of the most important things at the end of the day, being able to say no to an investment. Even if you’ve done a lot of work, work will never hurt you.

On returning to Brisbane, I realised fairly quickly that I am an experimentalist at heart. A career as a diagnostic virologist was not for me!

I’ve turned down opportunities constantly. I turn down invitations to do things for money. I have almost no interest in making money.

We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say no.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don’t go near the online bookies – unless it’s research. […] Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven’t written yet.

Don’t read your reviews. […] Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.) […] Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working. […] No going to London. […] No going anywhere else either.

Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect. […] Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.

To get this prize, I was required to talk about how important a particular European feminist woman writer had been to me. Now the truth was that I had never managed to finish this feminist writer’s book. It did not speak to me. It would have been a lie to claim that she had any major influence on my thinking. […] I could have said that this woman was important to me, and I could have talked the talk, and I could have been given the prize and a shiny present. But I didn’t.

When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is “bullshit.” I realize that answer is somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it. It's the junk food of experience. If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

What I'm not willing to accept is the enduring status quo around maternity. I asked Nike to contractually guarantee that I wouldn't be punished if I didn't perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth. I wanted to set a new standard. If I, one of Nike's most widely marketed athletes, couldn't secure these protections, who could?

I communicated that I wanted to skip press conferences at Roland Garros to exercise self-care and preservation of my mental health. I stand by that. Athletes are humans.

I just felt like it would be a little bit better to take a back seat, work on my mindfulness. And I knew that the girls would do an absolutely great job and I didn't want to risk the team a medal for kind of my screw ups because they've worked way too hard for that. So I just decided that those girls need to go in and do the rest of the competition.

But these days, if I have to choose between building my tennis résumé and building my family, I choose the latter.

I'm tired, I'm not myself and I'm not enjoying the sport as I have done for the last decade. Some might recognise it as burnout; I just know that over the last few years I haven't had the answers.

Yeah and we get calls all the time, and there's so many calls, but the like I said, it takes me five seconds to say no. It takes, Greg's a little more polite than I am, but I just as soon get the calls just to see what people are doing. But they aren't offering anything that's at an attractive price, and what they want is a trade.