Garry Kasparov Quotes

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.

Once you're a chess player, you spend a lot of time thinking about the game and you can't get it completely out of your head.

I started by just sitting by the chessboard exploring things. I didn't even have books at first, and I just played by myself. I learnt a lot from that, and I feel that it is a big reason why I now have a good intuitive understanding of chess.

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.

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

Many persons have been confused and discouraged at the very outset of the study by the great variety and the delicate distinctions of the openings: and this has constituted a fault in many otherwise excellent manuals for the learner.

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

Professional players work almost every day, for hours on end, and the emphasis is on the word 'work.' It can be with a partner or it can be alone, but professional chess is always a pursuit of something new and surprising.

My challenge when I came back was to face the young talent, dissect their games, and show them maybe that they needed to learn more about the game than just the money aspect.

Chess is so inspiring that I do not believe a good player is capable of having an evil thought during the game.

I was world champion. For me, chess is my life. It is everything.

Whoever sees no other aim in the game than that of giving checkmate to one's opponent will never become a good Chess player.

I love to play chess. The last time I was playing, I started to really see the board. I don't mean just seeing a few moves ahead - something else. My game started getting better. It's the patterns. The patterns are universal.

I think for me the main goal that I have, or at least what I really aspire to, is to raise the level of chess.

I play a lot of chess, just to a bog-average level. But I find it stimulates your mind with all the combinations of different moves.

We are studying the opponent all the time and it is maybe about chess and finding the right move at the right moment and that makes this so interesting.

When you watch chess, you don't see the four hours that the player spends preparing for a match ahead of time.

I started chess around the age of seven. I was inspired by the game, but soon legends like Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer, Anand and many other world champions captivated me.

If you talk to some of the older players, they definitely say they see beauty in certain games. In my case, there are certain times when I think, 'Wow, that's so amazing, chess is so full of ideas.' But most of the time I tend to be much more pragmatic about it, as opposed to thinking about it as art or something exquisite.

Why, then, do you think the white player might have done it?" Reynie considered. He imagined himself moving out his knight only to bring it right back to where it started. Why would he ever do such a thing? At last he said,"Perhaps because he doubted himself.

Furman astounded me with his chess depth, a depth which he revealed easily and naturally, as if all he were doing was establishing well-known truths.

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."

Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.

A grandmaster needs to retain thousands of games in his head, for games are to him what the words of their mother tongue are to ordinary people, or notes or scores to musicians.

A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.