“I don’t recommend trying to cram a lot of long opening-move variations into your head.”

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’d like to travel around, be an international playboy. They have all that money; they could really do it right. Look at (Errol) Flynn.

I don’t remember one thing I learned in school.

There are one-hundred fifty-four games in a season and you can find one-hundred fifty-four reasons why your team should have won every one of them.

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it’s game over. It’s control-alt-delete for civilization.

Games are like Rorschachs made of human relationships.

The person that is buying a share of stock is convinced he knows something that the other person who’s selling it to him does not know. There’s no zero sum game in Wall Street.

I don’t have a good attention span and can’t spend long in record stores or video shops or games emporiums without getting grumpy.

When I am starting a new game, I have to program it for the Apple, because I want to get all of the markets.

Baseball is a game of averages, but over a short period of time, to have a little luck going is not a bad thing.

I was 14 when I lost them [his front teeth]. The main thing was, we won that game, so I was the happiest. You hate to lose your teeth and the game, too.