"Never having played Chess before, it was most interesting to be playing the game with no pieces in front of me. But I still knew how to stroke my hair when I won"
"Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote"
"The chess player who develops the ability to play two dozen boards at a time will benefit from learning to compress his or her analysis into less time"