Vladimir Kramnik Quotes

Do you know the phrase, 'The word 'water' will not wet you?' It's one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.

You always try to take the positives and negatives out of the game.

Don't worry about the game you just won or the team that we just blew out... or, um... blown... blowed out... Let's think about what we need to do going forward, and they had, uh... blown out.

The practice of fiction can be dangerous: it puts ideas into the head of the world.

It was a crazy game. We could have scored five...oh right, we did score five, but we could have scored six, seven or eight.

I used to play a lot of chess and competitive chess and study chess and as you get to the grandmasters and learn their styles when you start copying their games like the way they express themselves through... The way Kasparov or Bobby Fischer expresses themselves through a game of chess is it's astonishing. You can show a chess master one of their games and they'll say "Yeah, that is done by that player."

The Nanjing games are homework by Garry Kasparov and me, [...] Today's game was provided by Garry.

For me, I always study the last games that have been played, not what happened in the past.

All obvious moves look dubious in analysis after the game.

I thought I did until I looked at some old game films. (When asked if he played college football)

By strictly observing Botvinnik's rule regarding the thorough analysis of one's own games, with the years I have come to realize that this provides the foundation for the continuous development of chess mastery.

As Olafsson showed me, White can win... It's hard to believe. I stayed up all night analysing, finally convicing myself, and, incidentally, learning a lot about Rook and Pawn endings in the process.

To my surprise I found that when other top players in the precomputer age (before 1995, roughly) wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns, they often made more mistakes in their annotations than the players had made at the board.

Angry Birds is a very simple idea but its one of those games that I immediately appreciated when I first started playing, before wishing that I had been the one to come up with the idea first.

Once a new idea springs into existence, it cannot be unthought. There is a sense of immortality in a new idea.

If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.

There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.

Indeed, loft aspirations produce ideas.

With science, ideas can germinate within a bed of theory, form, and practice that assists their growth... But we as gardeners, must beware... for some seeds are the seeds of ruin... and the most iridescent blooms are often the most dangerous

Our way is to practice one step at a time, one breath at a time, with no gaining idea.

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

Tennis is a game of angles. You never have time to figure the angles. It's practiced. It's so practiced that it becomes an instinct. You just know where to put the ball. You just feel it. It has been computed into your brain so many times ­ it is there.

I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.

You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.