Top 100 Walter Tevis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way.”

— Walter Tevis

2. “It’s foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity’s sake.”

— Walter Tevis

3. “The strongest person is the person who isn’t scared to be alone.”

— Walter Tevis

4. “Peter Piper picked up a peck of pickled peppers.”

— Walter Tevis

5. “To love the game itself is a fine thing; it is loving the art you live by.”

— Walter Tevis

6. “Did they ruin your mind when they ruined your eyes, Mr Newton?’ Newton.”

— Walter Tevis

7. “They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religion. I.”

— Walter Tevis

8. “Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.”

— Walter Tevis

9. “There had been a few times over the past year when she felt like this, with her mind not only dizzied but nearly terrified by the endlessness of chess.”

— Walter Tevis

10. “If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living. Synthetic.”

— Walter Tevis

11. “When the bottles hit they tinkled and jangled noisily; but Eddie did not hear them because of the overriding – yet distant, detached, far-off – sound of his own screaming.”

— Walter Tevis

12. “I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.”

— Walter Tevis

13. “In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever.”

— Walter Tevis

14. “I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”

— Walter Tevis

Featured in: Reading Quotes

15. “You drop that load too when you find yourself an excuse. Then, afterward, all you got to do is learn to feel sorry for yourself – and lots of people learn to get their kicks that way. It’s one of the best indoor sports, feeling sorry.” Bert’s face broke into an active grin. “A sport enjoyed by all. Especially the born losers.”

— Walter Tevis

16. “When literacy died, so had history.”

— Walter Tevis

17. “I have never in my life seemed to see and hear and think so clearly. Can it be because I have not used drugs this day? Or is it this act of writing? The two are so new and have come together so closely that I cannot be sure of which it is. It is extremely strange to feel like this. There is exhilaration to it, but the sense of risk is almost terrifying.”

— Walter Tevis

18. “It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it; I can dominate it. And it’s predictable. So, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.”

— Walter Tevis

19. “The Age of Technology has rusted.”

— Walter Tevis

20. “It is foolish to run the risk of going mad for vanity’s sake.’ I think of that sometimes when I’m analyzing my ass.”

— Walter Tevis

21. “My experience has taught me that what you know isn’t always important.” “What is important?” “Living and growing,” Mrs. Wheatley said with finality. “Living your life.”

— Walter Tevis

22. “You’ve been the best at what you do for so long you don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us.”

— Walter Tevis

23. “Not all of us are insane.’ ‘But most of you are. Enough of you are – it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.”

— Walter Tevis

24. “He did not become drunk in quite the same way that the humans did; or at least he thought he did not. He never wished to become unconscious, or riotously happy, or godlike; he only wanted relief, and he was not certain from what.”

— Walter Tevis

25. “She was alone, and she liked it. It was the way she had learned everything important in her life.”

— Walter Tevis

26. “He began to feel what he had sometimes felt before; a heavy lassitude, a world-weariness, a profound fatigue with this busy, busy, destructive world and all its chittering noises. He felt as though he could give the whole thing up, that it was foolish, impossibly foolish to have started it, more than twenty years before. He looked around him again, tiredly. What was he doing here – here on this other world, third from the sun, a hundred million miles from his home?”

— Walter Tevis

27. “Chess isn’t always competitive. Chess can also be beautiful.”

— Walter Tevis

28. “If you win, what will you do afterward?” He looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.” “If you’re World Champion at sixteen, what will you do with the rest of your life?” He still looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said.”

— Walter Tevis

29. “Was Newton, also a master of quiet morning drunkenness, looking for – for whatever it was that could supply a sane man in an insane world a reason for not being drunk in the morning?”

— Walter Tevis

30. “And what did being women have to do with it? She was better than any male player in America. She remembered the Life interviewer and the questions about her being a woman in a man’s world. To hell with her; it wouldn’t be a man’s world when she finished with it.”

— Walter Tevis

31. “She had flirted with alcohol for years. Now it was time to consummate the relationship.”

— Walter Tevis

32. “The archives voice was a long time replying. I had never heard a computer take so long. Or maybe it was merely the way I felt. Finally the voice came back and said, ‘Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”

— Walter Tevis

33. “Despite the Mexican reputation for gaiety and abandon, it was a quiet place, and the crowd seemed more like the crowd at a museum.”

— Walter Tevis

34. “Sometimes being with Benny was like being with no one at all. For hours at a time he would be completely impersonal. Something in her responded to that, and she became impersonal and cool herself, communicating nothing but chess.”

— Walter Tevis

35. “Beth had learned not to believe in God during her time in Methuen’s chapel, and she never prayed. But now she said, under her breath, Please God let me play Beltik and checkmate him.”

— Walter Tevis

36. “I could have done this at eight.”

— Walter Tevis

37. “She would have to bring her rook up to protect. He would take the knight with his queen, and if she took the bishop, the queen would pick off the roof in the corner with a check, and the whole thing would fall apart.”

— Walter Tevis

38. “She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her.”

— Walter Tevis

39. “She stayed where she was, not worrying about time, until she had it penetrated and understood. Then she got up, washed her face again and walked back into the gym. She had found her move.”

— Walter Tevis

40. “I don’t know how good I really am.” “I know,” he said. “You’re the best there is.”

— Walter Tevis

41. “He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are.”

— Walter Tevis

42. “With the pawn gone, she was open to rook-bishop mate because of the bishop on the open diagonal.”

— Walter Tevis

43. “There seemed to be a kind of insulation around her that kept everything at a distance.”

— Walter Tevis

44. “The man was very odd. Tall, thin, with white hair and a fine, delicate bone structure. He had smooth skin and a boyish face – but the eyes were very strange, as though they were weak, over-sensitive, yet with a look that was old and wise and tired.”

— Walter Tevis

45. “Doesn’t mankind have a right to choose its own form of destruction?”

— Walter Tevis

46. “Listening to the two of them, she had felt something unpleasant and familiar: the sense that chess was a thing between men, and she was an outsider. She hated the feeling.”

— Walter Tevis

47. “What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift?”

— Walter Tevis

48. “Benny, I like the way your hair looks.”

— Walter Tevis

49. “Trolls live in caves. Elves live everywhere. Elves have the power of adapting themselves to extraordinarily difficult environments, such as this one.” He waved a shaky hand out toward the lake, spilling gin on his shirt. “I am an elf, Doctor Bryce, and I live alone everywhere. Altogether everywhere alone.”

— Walter Tevis

50. “But she slept beautifully and awoke refreshed at eight, feeling confident, smart and ready.”

— Walter Tevis