The Art of Tennis

I take an immense amount of pleasure in writing. This may sound trite, but life is full of hardship—God only knows that. And life is full of a lot of bad things. I find that I've been blessed with an ability to feel pleasure rather intensely when I write. When I wrote about the artist Mondrian, I wanted to enhance the reader's pleasure in looking at a Mondrian painting—enhance it by following the forms, or by understanding the history of the artist and the painting. When I write about tennis, I want you to have an amusing experience as a reader. I don't want you to be bored; I want you to be in there imagining some of the colorful human exchanges that take place. I want you to imagine some of the amazing physical feats that take place. So, is—and I hope the word doesn't seem pretentious—but I think of myself as a celebrant. That's what I want to be.

On a personal note, I'm very close to my grandsons. And I know that, realistically, there'll be a time when I'm not around, so I hope that when they read what I've written in years to come, they'll enjoy … 'oh, there's Baba's sense of joy in things', and they'll understand it a little bit and have some smiles out of it.