“He's probably the only player who doesn't play for 10 months and, if he scores a hat trick in his first game back, no one would be surprised.”

“A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.”

“Archimedes was a mathematician," blurted Ethan from the back of the room. "And he was Greek. And he invented things." Ethan was the sort of student who was always keeping score--if he couldn't be the first to declare his knowledge of something, he would make certain you understood that he'd known it already. One day he would be declared the winner, and there would be a Smartest Boy trophy and a parade.”

“It had been hard for months. Sleep would curl slowly around him while he was reading a book, sleep would trick him that he was awake, sleep would play the best movies.”

“He settled his hat back into position. She was a rookie in her first big game, and he’d never let her see how close she’d come to unseating a champion”

“Speaking of Vaughan, his claim in the Daily Telegraph last week that the story of a senior county pro being offered money to fix domestic matches was 'the tip of the iceberg' did not go down well with one former England captain contacted by the Top Spin. 'I played the game for almost 20 years,' he seethed, 'and I don't know a single player who has been offered money, either for information or to fix a game. To say it's the tip of the iceberg is absolute rubbish.'The fact that the player in question had just registered a mediocre Stableford score of 20 playing off a handicap of 14 had nothing to do, I was assured, with his foul mood.”