It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school.

My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.

My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.

My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.

The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.

I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war.

Our family life was certainly not intellectual.

It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.

I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.

In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case; she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that we undertake.

I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.

While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.

I continue to be a photographer; I have enjoyed fishing and hunting with a close friend; and have owned two ranches, first in northern California and then in the state of Washington.

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done.

Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him.

Nowadays there is more dynamism in chess, modern players like to take the initiative. Usually they are poor defenders though.

Life's too short for chess.

I believe every chess player senses beauty, when he succeeds in creating situations, which contradict the expectations and the rules, and he succeeds in mastering this situation.

Chess is intellectual gymnastics.

I play chess badly and I've been beaten by my 10-year old son.

I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.

Far be it from me to force anyone into either chess or dressage, but if you choose to do so yourself, in my opinion there is only one way: follow the rules.

I also follow chess on the Internet, where Kasparov's site is very interesting.

Whoever sees no other aim in the game than that of giving checkmate to one's opponent will never become a good Chess player.

No, no, it is obvious that the ECU should act as a close alliance for the benefit of chess.

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

Nowadays the dynamic element is more important in chess - players more often sacrifice material to obtain dynamic compensation.

She felt like a chess player who, by the clever handling of his pieces, sees the game taking the course intended. Her eyes were bright and tender with a smile as they glanced up into his; and her lips looked hungry for the kiss which they invited.

I try to help developing junior chess. When I lived in USSR, I got a lot of free help from very good coaches - now I am trying to repay that debt.

The human element, the human flaw and the human nobility - those are the reasons that chess matches are won or lost.

My dad sacrificed many things in life for me. He abandoned a very promising and lucrative career of an army officer just so that he could continue helping me with my chess and accompanying me to tournaments.

There was one point in high school actually when I was on the chess team, marching band, model United Nations and debate club all at the same time. And I would spend time with the computer club after school. And I had just quit pottery club, which I was in junior high, but I let that go.

Chess is a sport. The main object in the game of chess remains the achievement of victory.

When I speak of the beauty of a game of chess, then naturally this is subjective. Beauty can be found in a very technical, mathematical game for example. That is the beauty of clarity.

In my country, at that time, being a champion of chess was like being a King. At that time I was a King - and when you are King you feel a lot of responsibility, but there is nobody there to help you.

The Soviet Union was an exception, but even there chess players were not rich. Only Fischer changed that.

Chess is life.

I think that by and large chess players have been very kind. Like I said there have been a few incidents, but they certainly didn't serve to bring me down any.

Every time I win a tournament I have to think that there is something wrong with modern chess.

I still love to play chess. So I do not even spend a minute on the possibility to step back.

Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.

If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.

For us chess players the language of artist is something natural.