Chess Quotes

" Chess is most certainly not my life."

" Do you realize, Fischer almost never has any bad pieces? He exchanges them, and the bad pieces remain with his opponents."

" I can't tell the difference between 100 zillion positions and 497 zillion positions, but if it helped Deep Blue play stronger, so be it. I was looking forward to Deep Blue boldly going where no man had gone before. 1997"

" (about Lasker) For me, this personality, notwithstanding his fundamentally optimistic attitude, had a tragic note. The enormous mental resilience, without which no chess player can exist, was so much taken up by chess that he could never free his mind of this game, even when he was occupied by philosophical and humanitarian questions."

" Chess is a sport. A violent sport."

" Kasparov was like Samson, but his hair has been shorn (2000)."

" Chess is not a game but a disease."

" The essence of chess is thinking about what chess is."

" The fact that a player is very short of time is, to my mind, as little to be considered an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the time he committed the crime."

" Oh, those exclamation points! How they erode the innocent soul of the amateur, removing all hope of allowing him to examine another player's ideas critically!"