Arthur Koestler Quotes

Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.

A lot of times, fighters get not only physically tired but mentally exhausted. It's like a chess match - you're thinking of offense and defense at the same time. It's almost exhausting to think about it. After a while, you just go, 'I'll move my pawn.' A lot of times in fights, people get exhausted, and they're just sick of trying to focus on it.

One quality that a director needs to acquire in Hollywood is to understand the system and figure out how to work within the system to express one's own ideas.

There's a joy and a pain about directing where the dreams you have are becoming concrete but the attention to detail, the need for time is such that it's overwhelming at times, and the stream of responsibility.

I didn't discover curves; I only uncovered them.

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.

If a director is really a director, I think he's interested in more than one thing.

For me, doing all the TV stuff and having the experience directing, knowing what you want to make is 90% of it. The rest of it is just guiding everybody on that one path. But, figuring out the path is the difficult part.

Studying technical design and art gave me the ability to see things in 3-D.

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.

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.

Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance

The best indicator of a Chess Player's form is his ability to sense the Climax of the game.

While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

To play chess on a truly high level requires a constant stream of exact, informed decisions, made in real time and under pressure from your opponent. What's more, it requires a synthesis of some very different virtues, all of which are necessary to good decisions: calculatioñ, creativity and a desire for results. If you ask a Grandmaster, an artist and a computer scientist what makes a good chess player, you'll get a glimpse of these different strengths in action.

I consider chess an art, and accept all those responsibilities which art places upon its devotees.

In Utero is a testament to the artistic vision of Kurt Cobain. It's kind of a weird record, and it's strangely beautiful at the same time. And if you look at Kurt's paintings and his drawings - he even did a sculpture for me - it's a rising, tortured-spirit person. It's kind of weird. It's done well, but it's like what Dave was saying about having your own sound. Kurt was a great songwriter. He knew he had a good ear for a hook [and was] a great singer, great guitar player, and In Utero is a good representation of what he liked in art and how he expressed himself.

What counts isn't being able to do a thing, it's seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.

I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

Playing rapid chess, one can lose the habit of concentrating for several hours in serious chess. That is why, if a player has big aims, he should limit his rapidplay in favour of serious chess.

If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.

Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer's concept.

The head of the photographer is more important than his camera

I like to play chess with bald men in the park although it's hard to find 32 of them.