It's always better to sacrifice your opponent's men

Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.

I talk to myself because I like dealing with a better class of people.

No one ever won a game by resigning.

The winner is the one who makes the next-to-last mistake.

Seize the outpost K5 with your knight, and you can go to sleep. Checkmate will come by itself.

The ability to create and to control the tension of battle is perhaps the principal attainment of the great player.

To avoid losing a piece, many a person has lost the game

A Chess game is divided into three stages: the first, when you hope you have the advantage, the second when you believe you have an advantage, and the third... when you know you're going to lose!

The tactician must know what to do whenever something needs doing; the strategist must know what to do when nothing needs doing

The mistakes are there, waiting to be made

You were not called to be a mere church-goer or seat-warmer in the Church of Christ

All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was.

There is/no reasoning with need.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

Both of my parents are surfers, of course, so they understood where my passion for surfing was at and I guess they saw the talent that I had.

I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

The pillars of Hercules of the United States are vulgarity and stupidity.

Sometimes, you just let the country have its way, and you don't try to determine the shape of the country. You sort of modestly step back and let the country figure out what it believes.

I'm not that fashion-conscious. A lot of times, when women are appearing to be so perfect, it's because they're a mess underneath.

It's like getting into film - I didn't say early on, 'I'm going to become a filmmaker,' 'I'm going to show my work at MoMA.' When you start to think those things, you're in trouble.