Chess is mental torture.

Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.

The loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.

A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.

The handover of power to [Dmitry] Medvedev was rather painless, everybody thought that the waves would calm automatically. By now, it's quite clear that [Vladimir] Putin doesn't want to relinquish the levers of power.

I think Russian people are learning that democracy is not an alien thing; it's not a western invention.

For me, chess is a language, and if it's not my native tongue, it is one I learned via the immersion method at a young age.