For me, the most important thing is to continue to play well and to be a positive figure and hopefully a role model for kids as well.

Some people think that if their opponent plays a beautiful game, it's OK to lose. I don't. You have to be merciless.

You need to have that edge, you need to have that confidence, you need to have that absolute belief that you're - you're the best and you'll win every time.

What I admired most about him [Bobby Fischer] was his ability to make what was in fact so difficult look easy to us. I try to emulate him.

Without the element of enjoyment, it is not worth trying to excel at anything.

You have to choose the move that feels right sometimes; that's what intuition is.

I am trying to beat the guy sitting across from me and trying to choose the moves that are most unpleasant for him and his style.

Maybe if I didn't have the talent in chess I'd find the talent in something else. The only thing I know is that I have talent in chess, and I'm satisfied with that.

I don't think there is a thing like overconfidence in chess. It's always better to be too confident than too reluctant.

People ask what my goal is. I don't have a goal.

When you have fun then you're more interested in learning.

To carry a secret is to play with fire. Try to pass it on and you'd risk hurting someone else. Hold on to it and eventually you'd get burned.

Titles are prisons of human potential

One well-cultivated talent deepened and enlarged is worth one hundred shallow faculties.

If you can't laugh at yourself, make fun of other people.

I went to art school, I think it helped me a great deal because it taught me who I am.

I just don't see me going through that rehab and coming back to pitch at this point in my life.

Displaying a bland, even an eerie, disregard for what appeared to be the facts of the situation, he fell back on an old habit of looking ahead to the next defeat.

The moral is to make all one can out of life and live up to one's fingers' ends.

When those who are governed do too little, those who govern can - and often will - do too much.

It never seemed fair that just when you're old enough to do anything you want, you can't. You have to start working, so there's no time. And if there is time, you're not working, so there's no money.