Adam Ross Quotes

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

There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

You can learn much about life from a checker game: surrender one to take two; don't make two moves at one time; move up, not down; and when you reach the top, you may move as you like.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

I'm pretty good at thinking about everything - all of my consequences - before I make a decision, and I think about everything that's going to happen because of that decision. I'm a Libra, and I'm very strategic.

Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters; it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

I really believe that a writer is someone who has trained their mind to misbehave.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.

I look at improvising as a prolonged game of chess. There's an opening gambit with your pawn in a complex game I have with one character, and lots of side games with other characters, and another game with myself - and in each game you make all these tiny, tiny moves that get you to the endgame.

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

I don't have any magical ability. I look at a problem, play with it, work out a strategy.

What I have to write, the story, it is always going on in my mind. What incidences I can add in the story - it is a continuous process.

I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

I never think in metaphors or fully make those kind of associations myself. I just lay down a complex situation and hope things arise from that.

Playing chess can make you a better poker player because it forces you to think several moves ahead. That kind of intense mental exercise develops a deeper level of thinking than is typically encountered when playing poker.

Life is very much about making the best decisions you can. So I think chess is very valuable.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

Actually, one of the fascinating things that I've learned playing chess is that the way you play chess is kind of like the way you live your life.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.