With each success the ability to change is reduced. My longtime friend and coach Grandmaster Yuri Dokhoian, aptly compared it to being dipped in bronze. Each victory added another coat.

One lesson is to not to play desperately if your position is worse but still reasonable. Lashing out wildly in an inferior position usually only hastens defeat. Meanwhile, solid, stubborn defense can demoralize the attacker, make him lose confidence. When that happens, the tables can turn. Keep fighting, stay steady, keep morale high - and public protests are good for all of these things.

Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves, but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you allowed to pass you by.

Without a goal [maneuvering is] aimless. You might be a master tactician, but you'll have no sense of strategy.

Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?

The Far East and Eastern Siberia are already developing according to a Chinese scenario, the full scope of which will be revealed in the near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of Russian territories will become at least de facto Chinese. This will change the situation in Russia fundamentally.

The sanctions and travel restrictions would have to be far more comprehensive to be truly painful for [Vladimir] Putin and his inner circle. And the new middle class should also feel the effects of what he is doing. For instance, we should ask those who wish to enter the EU whether they have visited illegally occupied Crimea in the last few months and, if the answer is "yes," deny them a visa.