30 Quotes by Mikhail Tal

Some sacrifices are sound; the rest are mine.

First, how to sac my queen, then rook, then bishop, then knight, then pawns.

I like to grasp the initiative and not give my opponent peace of mind.

When I asked Fischer why he had not played a certain move in our game, he replied: ‘Well, you laughed when I wrote it down!’

Quiet moves often make a stronger impression than a wild combination with heavy sacrifices.

In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language.

Later, I began to succeed in decisive games. Perhaps because I realized a very simple truth: not only was I worried, but also my opponent.

Of course, errors are not good for a chess game, but errors are unavoidable and in any case, a game without ant errors, or as they say ‘flawless game’ is colorless.

For pleasure you can read the games collections of Andersson and Chigorin, but for benefit you should study Tarrasch, Keres and Bronstein.