Magnus Carlsen

"I am not some sort of freak. I might be very good at chess but I'm just a normal person."

"I love the game, and I love to compete, but I am not obsessed with the struggle."

"I get more upset at losing at other things than chess. I always get upset when I lose at Monopoly."

"I feel sorry for players who are always lying awake at night, brooding over their games."

"He played the Berlin, I played the most solid line, yada yada yada, let's go to the doping control."

"The best way to deal with losing is not to lose."

"When did I understand it was a draw? I understood it immediately. That doesn't mean you shouldn't play."

"I think in general the future of classical chess as it is now is a little bit dubious. I would love to see more Fischer [Random] Chess being played over-the-board in a classical format. That would be very interesting to me, because I feel that that particular format is pretty well suited to classical chess as basically you need a lot of time in order to be able to play the game even remotely decently. And you can see that in the way that Fischer [Random] Chess is being played now when it is played in a rapid format. The quality of the games isn't very high because we make such fundamental mistakes in the opening. We don't understand it nearly enough and I think that would increase a lot if we were given a classical time control there. So I would definitely hope for that."

"I'm certainly somebody who hopes for more 960 in classical format because I feel like 960 is not that suited to rapid and blitz because you're just gonna play too poorly. You're just gonna have absolutely no clue, but if you actually have time to sit down and think for half an hour on your first five moves, then maybe you can get some more understanding of the game."

"I said, ‘I'll change tomorrow if that's okay, I just didn't even realize it today,’ but they said, ‘Well, you have to change now,’ and, well, at that point it became, you know, a bit of a matter of principle for me. [...] And yeah, so here we are."

"Honestly, I'm too old at this point to care too much. If this is what [the FIDE wants] to do [...] It's fine by me [...] [I'll] probably head off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer than here."

"Of course, I could have changed. Obviously, I didn’t want to. I stand by that."

"They can enforce their rules, that's fine by me [...] my response is that fine, then I'm out, like, fuck you."

"You could say that both Fischer and Carlsen had or have the ability to let chess look simple. – Viswanathan Anand"

"In six months of working with Magnus I have seen in him many of the qualities of the great champions. – Garry Kasparov"

"The chess world is officially a joke. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN DONE IN HISTORY. I can’t believe that the official body of chess is being controlled by a singular player FOR THE 2ND TIME THIS WEEK. THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE WORLD CHAMPION!"