Anatoly Karpov Quotes

He can be regarded as the great master of simplification. The art of resolving the tension at the critical moment and in the most effacious way so as to clarify the position as desired is Capablanca's own.

Capablanca was snatched too early from the chess world. With his death we have lost a great chess genius, the like of whom we will never see again.

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

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

When I was a kid, I really liked playing chess, which is pretty geeky; I just enjoyed it - thinking, exercising my mind. And I found computers to be like an eight-hour day chess game.

When I speak of the beauty of a game of chess, then naturally this is subjective. Beauty can be found in a very technical, mathematical game for example. That is the beauty of clarity.

A woman can beat any man; it's difficult to imagine another kind of sport where a woman can beat a man. That's why I like chess.

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

Recently I saw Kasparov and he looked to me as still young and potent champion.

I consider myself to be a genius who happens to play chess.

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

It is impossible to win gracefully at chess.

You can become a big master in chess only if you see your mistakes and short-comings. Exactly the same as in life itself.

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.

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.

During a chess tournament a master must envisage himself as a cross between an ascetic monk and a beast of prey.

Capablanca plays very superficially sometimes, in a way that can only be ascribed to lack of concentration. This is an integral weakness of his make-up and can only be partially compensated by his employing his time allowance to the full.

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.

Chess, like other arts, must be practiced to be appreciated.

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.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

I honestly feel very humble when I study Capablanca's games.

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.

Nowadays, when you're not a grandmaster at 14, you can forget about it