“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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

I want to see the U.S. wiped out. Death to the U.S.

Psychologically, you have to have confidence in yourself and this confidence should be based on fact.

You are never too old to play chess!

I often play a move I know how to refute.

In football, you are mostly reacting from a defensive point of view…but you always want to be counterattacking…a similarity with chess strategy.

Chess and offensive football are quite similar; you sacrifice something now to get something back later.

Ralph… would treat the day’s decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

If you look at the democratic process as a game of chess, there have to be many, many moves before you get to checkmate. And simply because you do not make any checkmate in three moves does not mean it’s stalemate.

Chess is a cure for headaches.

The higher influences which control the world and the ties which link Chess with the human soul.

The pitcher setting up the batter. It’s chess, and you play with it.