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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What seeds are you planting?

I'm not about love, but in this moment, I wish that I were.

God, you smell nice, ” he whispered. “I've missed that smell. I've missed everything about you, little Ann.

My reaction when I hear the word 'celebrity' is, 'Who, me?' It doesn't feel like I'm famous.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next virtue is doing it.

You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.

Prayer is the way to destroy all fear. It is the way to banish sorrow, the way to light a torch of hope. It is the revolution that rewrites the scenario of our destiny.

I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.

Purity prepares the soul for love, and love confirms the soul in purity.

I'll be honest, I worry sometimes about what I've done. I have tied my whole person to my art and, whatever it takes to get that hook, I will go there and do it.