“Too many times, people don’t try their best. They don’t have the keen spirit; the winning spirit. And once you make it you’ve got to guard your reputation – every day go in like an unknown to prove yourself. That’s why I don’t clown around.”

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.

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!

The Russians have held my title for ten years and they’re going to be in for it when I win the Championship. They’re going to have to wait and play under my conditions.

I don’t keep any close friends. I don’t keep any secrets. I don’t need friends. I just tell everybody everything, that’s all.

I’ll bet every great thinker and leader we’ve got Could see all kinds of things other people could not!

You grow up real quick, a half-Mexican in a sailor’s suit, because I’d be riding the streetcar to school everyday.

In the ’80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear – that if I didn’t, people would soon forget about me.

Almost every cartoonist, when he’s sitting down to draw a funny face.

I probably write a poem every 50 years.

The place that I worked I used to joke about it. There was a, every morning at 10:30 I’d come into work and I’d go into this cubicle that had a little upright piano and fake white cork bricks on the wall.

We need a war every 10 years, so we can stay match fit in case the Germans try again.

I probably worked every single entertainment medium, including some that don’t exist.