Charles Simic Quotes

The very idea of how chess players manipulate their game excites me.

I learned to play chess at a young age, and I think that's where learning to plan things out and put things in position, that was the best thing for me.

Thank you, darling, for learning to play chess. It is an absolute necessity for any well organized family. (in a letter to his wife)

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

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.

I'm a solo skater; the sport can be lonely.

It's an individual sport so you get in the ring on your own and then when you retire you tend to spend the rest of your life on your own.

The power to bring me out of solitude - or to push me back into it - had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.

Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

I know people who have all the will in the world, but still can't play good Chess

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

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.

Blitz chess kills your ideas.

Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy.

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.

Chess demands total concentration

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

Today, chess programs have become so good that even grandmasters sometimes struggle to understand the logic behind some of their moves.

In chess there can never be a favorite move. I can probably pinpoint in a specific game, there might be a move that was like, "Oh, that was a good move." And maybe certain moves turned the whole game around, but there's not one special move that does that, unless it's checkmate because that's when the game is over.

In my experience, when I went to school, and especially in after-school, and during breaks, a lot of people wanted to sit down and play chess up till a certain age when it was not supposed to be cool anymore and people wanted to do other things.

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.

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

You can't play chess if you're groggy from pills.

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.