If you look at the gifted sportsman, like Tiger Woods, or Ryan Giggs, you can see how they have been built up to be so much more than one person could ever be.

Bobby Fischer was hugely important for the American chess community because it put chess on the map - he made it possible for other chess players to make a living.

Every film I make I feel like I am getting a mini-masters degree, it's a wonderful life path and you get to immerse yourself in an intriguing world for a couple of years.

I guess what I get excited about when I'm thinking about projects is that toothy, complex area of goodness and badness and the gray areas of human behavior and existence.

When your entire life is focused around one goal and one goal only, and you have no other pursuits, it enables you to achieve enormous mastery.

Each project draws you in on its own merits as opposed to an intellectual choice of, "Well, I'm going to shift from vérité filmmaking to more archival."

I don't think you make documentary films to get your country house. If you're trying to gamble on that, you've very foolish.

I think the combination of genius and celebrity, in the case of Bobby Fischer, was a dangerous cocktail.

In the Soviet Union, for instance, the pressure on the chess stars was immense. When Boris Spassky came home after losing that match, he found he no longer had an apartment in Moscow.

Success is the result of actions. Stop wishing and start doing.

You are ugly now, on the inside, where it matters most...you are beastly.

I left this conversation hours ago, but somehow my mouth is still moving, words are still forming, and none have seemed to offend. Amazing, the mind. My mind, I mean. Not hers.

Lotteries, a tax upon imbeciles.

The bigger the State, the smaller the citizen

I fancy our chances at the European Championships.

Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.

...it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction.

If today were my last day, would I do what I'm doing?...If the answer was 'No' too many days in a row, I'd make a change.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.