I think the combination of genius and celebrity, in the case of Bobby Fischer, was a dangerous cocktail.

Bobby Fischer was hugely important for the American chess community because it put chess on the map - he made it possible for other chess players to make a living.

Every film I make I feel like I am getting a mini-masters degree, it's a wonderful life path and you get to immerse yourself in an intriguing world for a couple of years.

I guess what I get excited about when I'm thinking about projects is that toothy, complex area of goodness and badness and the gray areas of human behavior and existence.

When your entire life is focused around one goal and one goal only, and you have no other pursuits, it enables you to achieve enormous mastery.

Each project draws you in on its own merits as opposed to an intellectual choice of, "Well, I'm going to shift from vérité filmmaking to more archival."

I don't think you make documentary films to get your country house. If you're trying to gamble on that, you've very foolish.

In the Soviet Union, for instance, the pressure on the chess stars was immense. When Boris Spassky came home after losing that match, he found he no longer had an apartment in Moscow.

If you look at the gifted sportsman, like Tiger Woods, or Ryan Giggs, you can see how they have been built up to be so much more than one person could ever be.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...

So here is another law, one of my favourite If I become famous the stupidy will end one for all. It's basically a jail for mankind stupidy!

To help with knowing if you're good or not, you need a mentor.

Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.

San Francisco's winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal

It is ill to marry in the month of May.

I love everybody. Even George Bush.

The world in many ways would be a much calmer and gentler place if women ruled. There would have been fewer children sacrificed to the gods of greed and power.

While we lie tumbling in the hay.