Viswanathan Anand Quotes

Magnus has many good qualities... he is very versatile and he can play a lot of positions at a very high level. He's also very flexible. And he has this amazing talent for grinding on, as you say. So that combination I was unable to deal with.

To become a world chess champion.

I have what I think is an extremely Indian relationship with God....In Moscow before the tie breaker of the World Championship in May 2012, I again entreated God:Just stay on my side of the board.

One of the things I bring to my play is my Indian identity – my ability to shrug off a loss as destiny and hope for better tomorrow. I am often described as a “natural” or “intuitive player”.

What happens to you at the board begins to feel like it's happening to you in person.

When you lose, you really feel a sense of self … You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.

When I first visited Moscow in the late 1980s, I was so intimidated. I thought I could be checkmated by every cabdriver.

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

I learned to play fast without agonizing about strategy or overanalyzing individual moves

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.

Being the undisputed world champion is a relief. We instituted a unified chess title, I am the absolute world champion.

I can relate to many of the emotions they describe...But personally I just like to get on with the job of playing chess. I understand that if I win, I'm probably crushing my opponent's ego but it's not like I do that with great satisfaction. So I don't really look for conflict around the game … It's true that someone like Kasparov has this sense of history, and I'm talking world history rather than chess history. He has a sense of himself being in it, which, for me, is very hard to understand or even relate to in any way.

Since the 1990s technology has taken some of the sheen off the Russian trainers and their methods.

The fact is he outplayed me. He just proved to be stronger.

Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer.