“Nobody has single-handedly done more for the US image than me…”

They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since.

I add status to any tournament I attend.

A strong memory, concentration, imagination, and a strong will is required to become a great Chess player

Romance is an illusion. Well, romance is not a complete illusion, but it’s ephemeral. It does not last.

Now my only income is a few royalty cheques from my books.

If I win a tournament, I win it by myself. I do the playing. Nobody helps me

I prepare myself well. I know what I can do before I go in. I’m always confident.

I’ve always been very interested in fashion, but it is extremely important to me that the social and environment issues associated with the production of fashionable clothing are addressed.

I felt that chess… is a science in the form of a game… I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

People have been playing against me below their strength for fifteen years.

There’s no luck involved in chess. You just have to work at it.

I think it’s almost definite that the game is a draw theoretically.

When I won the World Championship in ’72, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country.

I studied that first Karpov-Kasparov match for a year and a half before I cracked it, what they were doing, and discovered that it was all prearranged move-by-move. There’s no doubt of it in my mind.

Genius. It’s a word. What does it really mean? If I win I’m a genius. If I don’t, I’m not.

A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he’s like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.

This time, I wanted to know if I was able to create images with words, with the sound of words.

I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.

We use up words as we use up images. We use up everything, and that’s good, because it makes us grow.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

To be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existenceof a ghost).

By creating so many illusory images of physical perfection.

Success is the best builder of character.