"He would lie till evening in the greyish, verminous sheets, smoking and reading old newspapers. Sometimes we played chess."

"We had no board, but we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and afterwards we made a board from the side of a packing-case, and a set of men from buttons, Belgian coins and the like. Boris, like many Russians, had a passion for chess. It was a saying of his that the rules of chess are the same as the rules of love and war, and that if you can win at one you can win at the others. But he also said that if you have a chessboard you do not mind being hungry, which was certainly not true in my case."

I'm reading George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London."