The World Champions I Knew Quotes

“Day-to-day life with a genius is immeasurably more difficult than life with an ordinary person. A genius, like anyone else, can be self-obsessed, inattentive, capricious, mistrustful or irritable. And only after his death, when the trumpets start to resound, and the insults are covered with haze and disappear, do the things that only those who were close to him knew and went through go somewhere far away, and now become so unimportant and insignificant. And it seems that the time that was spent with that person was real life, and now all that’s left is remembering and describing the happy times of the past for others.”
― Genna Sosonko, The World Champions I Knew

“After he lost the return match to Botvinnik, Tal’s mother sighed: ‘Misha would never have lost the title of World Champion if he’d been kept in prison between matches.”
― Genna Sosonko, The World Champions I Knew