My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

It was there I met my future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten years later.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country.

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

I was born in Palo Alto, California in 1961.

Conversely, I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason to avoid doing it.

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs.

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.

My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

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.