I have failed at times, but I have never stopped trying.
You don't play for revenge, you play for respect & pride
If you don't ask for the best, you don't get it.
No dream is ever chased alone.
You don't win or lose the games bcoz of 11 you select. You win or lose with what those 11 do on the field.
I think we judge talent wrong. What do we see as talent? I think I have made the same mistake myself. We judge talent by people's ability to strike a cricket ball. The sweetness, the timing. That's the only thing we see as talent. Things like determination, courage, discipline, temperament, these are also talent.
I am what I am. I have not deliberately built an image for myself.
I have the kind of personality that I always look ahead than look at what's happened. It does help a lot, especially when you've done badly or you've failed. It's instinctive of me that I look at what's next, I look ahead a lot, and start preparing for that, in victory and in defeat.
My approach to cricket has been reasonably simple: it was about giving everything to the team, it was about playing with dignity and it was about upholding the spirit of the game. I hope I have done some of that. I have failed at times, but I have never stopped trying. It is why I leave with sadness but also with pride.
Even if my grandchildren don’t remember the fact that I scored 10,000 runs in Test and ODI cricket, I am confident that they will remember that Sachin Tendulkar used to be my team-mate.
I leave with sadness, but also with pride.
I was like every other boy in India, with a dream of playing for my country. Yet I could never have imagined a journey so long and so fulfilling. No dream is ever chased alone.
Reading allows me to recharge my batteries.
Cricket is just something that I am good at, just like various people are good at various things. What's lucky is that cricket gets enormous publicity.
You get an image in the first couple of years of your career, and then whether you like it or not, you are stuck with it for the rest of your life.
The bowlers I respected or feared or rated were not the ones who gave me lip or stared at me or abused me. More the ones who, at any stage of the game, when had they had the ball in hand, they were going to be at me, and they were going to have the skill and the fitness and the ability to be aggressive.
While I played Ranji Trophy for five years, I used to be asked, 'When are you playing for the nation?' - a question which I didn't have any answer to. I kept playing before I got my first break in 1996; those five years were indeed frustrating.
Tendulkar must have known from his heart
Pravin Tambe is bigger inspiration than me for young cricketers
I was telling people if every time I answered a question about Multan I got a rupee, I would be a multimillionaire by now.
Unwanted honking not only irritates others, but may also end up causing accidents. Drivers lose cool and it may result in road rage.
I think credibility, irrespective of what you do, if you are in public life, then it is important.
If someone thinks, 'I'll spend the off season working on my fitness and I'll come back a better cricketer,' I don't think that's enough. You need to spend a lot of time working on your skills and honing your skills.
There are so many fans and so many people who care deeply about this game, and it is because of these fans that we are who we are as cricketers.
There is no substitute to taking a lot of a catches as a youngster if you want to do slip catching - you've got to catch, catch, catch. And more than doing the normal stuff, you have to vary your catching - you've got to take some catches with the tennis ball, you got to take some closer, some further away.
