"As a young kid sprouting a wispy moustache, I was sometimes dismissed by the Russians as an upstart. I have been referred to even as a “coffeehouse player”"

"When I started out, Indians did not have much interest in chess…Now India seems to spawn new chess academies every day."

"My dream is chess played in every school in India. The Soviets would include a chessboard along with the bride’s trousseau to ensure that the children born of that marriage knew the rules of chess."

"He must make sure Magnus is out of his comfort zone, he needs to direct the positions. It needs to be a mess. He needs to get Magnus into a brawl."

"It's going to be important for him to start ducking and weaving and playing different positions."

"The center of the chessboard is a magnet, which pulls to itself all the pieces. Therefore the most beautiful and amazing moves, for me, are those with which a piece, counteracting the gravitational force of the center, suddenly fly to the edge of the board."

"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!"

"When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport."

"Coaching secrets? I don’t think I got any. The main "secret" – love for chess."

"Chess is not Mathematics, where ten is always more than one; in chess the King with a pawn can beat opponent's King with all pieces if they are placed badly."

"Learn from each one of your defeats; your losses must be as close to you as your victories."

"Even Ashot's mistakes contain elements of creativity."

"When he is inspired, he is capable of producing magic."

"After having been present at his amusing lessons just once, I will always feel envious of his students."

"I could keep talking about Ashot as chess player, composer, theoretician, or a trainer; however I would rather write about him as a person. If I were asked, which of my close friends is the most honest and kind, I would not hesitate to name Ashot."

"Ashot is a born trainer."

"Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy."

"From Anderssen I learned the art of making combinations; from Tarrasch I learned how advantageously to avoid making them."

"The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it."

"Up to this point White has been following well-known analysis, but now he makes a fatal error - he begins to use his own head."

"In tournaments it is not enough to be a connoisseur of chess; one must also play well."

"Many have become Chess Masters, no one has become the Master of Chess."

"Before the endgame, the Gods have placed the middle game."

"He who fears an isolated Queen's Pawn should give up Chess."

"To acquire a reputation of being a dashing player at the cost of losing a game."

"Mistrust is the most necessary characteristic of the Chess player."

"The rooks belong behind passed pawns, behind their own in order to support their advance, behind the enemy's in order to impede their advance."

"Chess is a form of intellectual productiveness, therein lies, its peculiar charm. Intellectual productiveness is one of the greatest joys -if not the greatest one- of human existence. It is not everyone who can write a play, or build a bridge, or even make a good joke. But in chess everyone can, everyone must, be intellectually productive and so can share in this select delight. I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity for the man who has no knowledge of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy."

"They could start by removing some personnel: the head-butting, move-retracting, tournament-rigging, Zurab Azmaiparashvili for instance. He is a disgrace to the organisation. But never let it be said that he is a dunderhead."

"A friend of mine recently joked that his mobile phone will beat Magnus Carlsen. I said, ‘What are you talking about? My microwave could beat Magnus Carlsen.'"

"It is curious that it is far easier to maintain a high "manners" rating if, like Kasparov, you simply don't speak to anyone. I still have much to learn from the great man..."

"Rublevsky is not a sexy player."

"In order to improve your game you must study the endgame before anything else; for, whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middlegame and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame."

"Morphy's principal strength does not rest upon his power of combination but in his position play and his general style....Beginning with la Bourdonnais to the present, and including Lasker, we find that the greatest stylist has been Morphy. Whence the reason, although it might not be the only one, why he is generally considered the greatest of all."

"I am always reminded of the case of a noted American journalist, an excellent fellow, well educated, and, at the time I have in mind, chess champion of the state in which he resided. My friend devoted a great deal of time and energy to the study of the openings. Whenever I passed through his city he always came to the station for me and put me up at his house. We would have frequent conversations during which he would ask me about this or that variation; to his great surprise I would almost always answer, "I don't know it" Then he would say: "What will you do when somebody plays it against you?" And I would reply, "Ninety percent of the book variations have no great value, because either they contain mistakes or they are based on fallacious assumptions; just forget about the openings and spend all that time on the endings. In the long run you will get much better results that way.""