"There's nothing simpler than avoiding people you don't like. Avoiding one's friends, that's the real test."

“I'm not a stereotypical professor type. I don't smoke a pipe and wear a tweedy jacket. I'm more like a student who stayed at the university for so long that they gave him a job to keep him out of trouble.”

“I am always frustrated when I see situations that could have been handled simpler.”

“Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going. Rather than always focusing on what's urgent, learn to focus on what is really important.”

“If you are weak in the endgame, you must spend more time analysing studies; in your training games you must aim at transposing to endgames, which will help you to acquire the requisite experience.”

Source : Mikhail Botvinnik (2012). “Botvinnik: 100 Selected Games”, p.11, Courier Corporation

“The time was simply ripe for the disappearance of tonality. Naturally this was a fierce struggle; inhibitions of the most frightful kind had to be overcome, the panic fear, 'Is that possible, then?' So it came about that gradually a piece was written, firmly and consciously, that wasn't in a definite key any more.”

“An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.”

Source : Charles Olson (1993). “Selected Poems of Charles Olson”, p.148, Univ of California Press

“My daughter's all grown up now compared to what she was, but I used to say, I’ve got to have my horse to where if she’s leading my horse somewhere, and she’s got a big armload of Barbies and drops something out of her hand, that son of a buck ought to stop and respect her while she’s gathering up all her dolls and not to walk on her or take advantage of her. And if I’ve done my work right, by gosh, that’s what they’ll do.”

“Music creates a certain mood and then people dress accordingly. I think it's all quite closely intertwined.”