I dropped the King's Indian in 1997 after one too many bad experiences against Kramnik.

The best chess masters of every epoch have been closely linked with the values of the society in which they lived and worked. All the changes of a cultural, political, and psychological background are reflected in the style and ideas of their play.

Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance

Kortchnoi's heritage is many-faceted - over the decades he has several times corrected and changed his style. But the main thing has invariably remained his search for chess truth.

If critics and competitors can't match your results, they will often denigrate the way you achieve them. Fast, intuitive types are called lazy. Dedicated burners of the midnight oil are called obsessed. And while it's obviously not a bad idea to hear and consider the opinions of others, you should be suspicious when these criticisms emerge right on the heels of success.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

People's minds are polluted by these dark pictures of the future from Hollywood: "The Terminator," the Skynet, "The Matrix." It's world where there's no room for humans, or they have to fight against the machines. I think it's just a way, way, way, way in the future. Is it going to happen? I don't know. For me, these debates are not similar, but they resemble debates about how the sun will turn into a supernova in 4 to 5 billion years. Frankly, I don't care.