Bobby Fischer Quotes

Chess demands total concentration

Thank you, darling, for learning to play chess. It is an absolute necessity for any well organized family. (in a letter to his wife)

I'm a pretty good chess player.

I could think six shots ahead. It's no different to playing chess.

I learned to play chess at a young age, and I think that's where learning to plan things out and put things in position, that was the best thing for me.

Writing is sort of like chess for me. You have to think carefully before you move, thinking, planning.

By all means examine the games of the great chess players, but don't swallow them whole. Their games are valuable not for their separate moves, but for their vision of chess, their way of thinking.

Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy.

In chess there can never be a favorite move. I can probably pinpoint in a specific game, there might be a move that was like, "Oh, that was a good move." And maybe certain moves turned the whole game around, but there's not one special move that does that, unless it's checkmate because that's when the game is over.

I consider chess an art, and accept all those responsibilities which art places upon its devotees.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life

Leverage your time more by spending a little more time every day imagining and a lot less time every day doing. Do a little more imagining and a little more less doing. Until eventually most of what's happening is happening in the cool, calm, anticipatory state. Just imagine yourself into the successes, and watch what happens. Imagine a little more and act a little less.

Capture of the adverse King is the ultimate but not the first object of the game

Playing for complications is an extreme measure that a player should adopt only when he cannot find a clear and logical plan.

I study chess eight hours a day, on principle.

Psychology is the most important factor in chess.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

The great successful men of the world have used their imagination. They think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building - steadily building.

Chess makes man wiser and clear-sighted.

My very first book was a games collection of Anatoly Karpov. On the whole I was attracted by positonal play with some tactics, and already then I was aiming for universality.

We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.

Don't just play your way around the course. Think your way around way around the course.

Sometimes I do have something in my head. But, for me, I think it usually ends up being about considering all of the elements, and trying to understand the distance from where we are to where we want to go.

Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.