Anton Chekhov Quotes
When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.
Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.
we all have too many wheels, screws and valves to judge each other on first impressions or one or two pointers. I don't understand you, you don't understand me and we don't understand ourselves.
And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!
And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.
What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won't seem important at all.
A person loves to talk about his illnesses although that is the least interesting part of his life.
Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.
One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts.
A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!
The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.
I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.
Once you've married, be strict but just with your wife, don't allow her to forget herself, and when a misunderstanding arises, say: "Don't forget that I made you happy.
When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean-that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses-that is science.
There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.
I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!
The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.
In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don't seem to understand what I say.
A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.
Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.
A grimy fly can soil the entire wall and a small, dirty little act can ruin the entire proceedings.
Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.
Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.
To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.
Only those young people can be accepted as healthy who refuse to be reconciled with the old order and foolishly or wisely struggle against it - such is the will of nature...
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.