Viswanathan Anand Quotes

I don't consider myself a particularly young chess player. I have been playing in the best tournaments in the world since I was 16 years old. In other sports, if you have been playing for seven years, you are not a young prodigy any more. You're one of the pros.

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

It's a shame to be the face of chess and to play chess badly.

My former coach, Simen Agdestein, used to be the best player in Norway.

Carlsen will be ridiculously difficult to play against. (on the 2013 World Championship match)

What I admired most about him [Bobby Fischer] was his ability to make what was in fact so difficult look easy to us. I try to emulate him.

If you want to become a World Champion you should avoid playing in Open tournaments.

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.

Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic.

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.

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.

The first great chess players, including the world champion, got by perfectly well without constant coaches.

Chess will always be the master of us all.

A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.

Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.

Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.

The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.

The ideal in chess can only be a collective image, but in my opinion it is Capablanca who most closely approaches this.

I didn't picture myself as even a grandmaster, to say nothing of aspiring to the chess crown. This was not because I was timid - I wasn't - but because I simply lived in one world, and the grandmasters existed in a completely different one. People like that were not really even people, but like gods or mythical heroes.

It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.

There is only one thing Fischer does in Chess without pleasure: to lose!

Chess is everything: art, science, and sport.

Chess is one long regret.

In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess - Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer - were born in America.

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles