Chekhov Quotes

Everybody says: the Kremlin, the Kremlin. They all go on about it, but I've never seen it. The number of times (thousands) I've been drunk or hung over, traipsing round Moscow, north-south, east-west, end to end, straight through or any old way - and I've never once seen the Kremlin.

For instance, yesterday - yesterday I didn't see it again, though I was buzzing round that area the whole evening and it's not as if I was particularly drunk. I mean, as soon as I came out onto Savyelov Station, I had a glass of Zubrovka for starters, since I know from experience that as an early-morning tipple, nobody's so far dreamed up anything better.

Anyway, a glass of Zubrovka. Then after that - on Kalyaev Street - another glass, only not Zubrovka this time, but coriander vodka. A friend of mine used to say coriander had a dehumanizing effect on a person, i.e, it refreshes your parts but it weakens your spirit. For some reason or other it had the opposite effect on me, i.e., my spirit was refreshed, while my parts all went to hell. But I do agree it's dehumanizing, so that's why I topped it up with two glasses of Zhiguli beer, plus some egg-nog straight from the bottle, in the middle of Kalyaev Street.

Of course, you're saying: come on, Venya, get on with it - what did you have next? And I couldn't say for sure. I remember - I remember quite distinctly in fact - I had two glasses of Hunter's vodka, on Chekhov Street. But I couldn't have made it across th ~ Venedikt Erofeev

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel. ~ Anton Chekhov

Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author. ~ Anton Chekhov

[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion. ~ Anton Chekhov

There are people whom even children's literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon. ~ Anton Chekhov

It's obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren't for their silence, happiness would be quiet impossible. It's a kind of mass hypnosis ~ Anton Chekhov

You don't believe in your right to it; and here now you can't sleep. ~ Anton Chekhov

We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating. ~ Anton Chekhov

You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist. ~ Anton Chekhov

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner

Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politics and law.

"How about fiction - novels, plays poetry?" I asked.

"No," he said, "I have never had time for them. There's so much else I have to read."

I said, "Sir, I have recently visited Russia for the third time and don't know how well I understand Russians; but I do know that if I only read Russian history I could not have had the access to Russian thinking I have had from reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Sholokhov, and Ehrenburg. History only recounts, with some inaccuracy, what they did. The fiction tells, or tries to tell, why they did it and what they felt and were like when they did it."

My friend nodded gravely. "I hadn't though of that," he said. "Yes, that might be so; I had always thought of fiction as opposed to fact."

But in considering the American past, how poor we would be in information without Huckleberry Fin, An American Tragedy, Winesburg, Ohio, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying. ~ John Steinbeck

I was once invited to the circuit court as an expert; during a break, one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor's rude treatment of the defendants, among whom were two women of the intelligentsia. I don't think I was exaggerating in the least when I answered my colleague that this treatment was no more rude than that displayed towards each other by the authors of serious articles. Indeed, it is such rude treatment that one cannot speak of it without pain. Either they treat each other and the authors they criticize with excessive deference, forgetting all dignity, or the reverse, they handle them with greater boldness than I use in these notes, and in my thoughts, towards my future son-in-law Gnekker. ~ Anton Chekhov

I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious. ~ Anton Chekhov

Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses everywhere.
- Rothchild's Fiddle ~ Anton Chekhov

It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth. ~ Anton Chekhov

Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism. ~ Tom Stoppard

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity. ~ Anton Chekhov

Nadya Zelenin and her mother had returned from a performance of Eugene Onegin at the theatre. Going into her room, the girl swiftly threw off her dress and let her hair down. Then she quickly sat at the table in her petticoat and white bodice to write a letter like Tatyana's.
'I love you,' she wrote, 'but you don't love me, you don't love me!'
Having written this, she laughed.
She was only sixteen and had never loved anyone yet. She knew that Gorny (an army officer) and Gruzdyov (a student) were both in love with her, but now, after the opera, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and miserable: what an attractive idea! There was something beautiful, touching and romantic about A loving B when B wasn't interested in A. Onegin was attractive in not loving at all, while Tatyana was enchanting because she loved greatly. Had they loved equally and been happy they might have seemed boring.
("After The Theatre") ~ Anton Chekhov

People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people. ~ Anton Chekhov

How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out. ~ Anton Chekhov

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me. ~ Eudora Welty

When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is. ~ Anton Chekhov

[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh. ~ Anton Chekhov

Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one. ~ Anton Chekhov

And when it seemed as though the mists were hiding a fathomless abyss, Lipa and her mother who were born in poverty and prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except their frightened, gentle souls, may have fancied for a minute perhaps that in the vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives, they, too, counted for something ... ~ Anton Chekhov

In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won"t be there to see it - but it"s why we live, why we work. It"s why we suffer. We"re creating it. That"s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal. ~ Anton Chekhov

The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted the murderer. ~ Anton Chekhov

Write, write, write-till your fingers break. ~ Anton Chekhov

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved. ~ Anton Chekhov

In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn't yetappeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father. ~ Anton Chekhov

If you cry 'Forward' you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions? ~ Anton Chekhov

Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions. ~ Anton Chekhov

An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket. ~ Anton Chekhov

You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years ... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away ... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him. ~ Anton Chekhov

In Russia there is no philosophy, but philosophize everything, even the small fry. ~ Anton Chekhov

If I dismiss the ordinary - waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life ... To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories - to know that we are doing what we're supposed to be doing - is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, 'When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.' This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don't know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring. ~ Dani Shapiro

Not to sleep during the night means to be aware every moment of your abnormality, and therefore I wait impatiently for morning and daylight, when I have the right not to sleep. ~ Anton Chekhov

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things. ~ Anton Chekhov

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy. ~ Anton Chekhov

In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life. ~ Anton Chekhov

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man. ~ Anton Chekhov

The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing. ~ Anton Chekhov

You refer me to the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is there order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature, should stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could jump it or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait? Wait, when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full of the desire to live! ~ Anton Chekhov

He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom. ~ Anton Chekhov

Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all. ~ Anton Chekhov

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character. ~ Alex Kingston

He keeps going, going, going on; his people groan and fall one after the other, but he keeps on going, going and in the end, perishes himself, but still remains the despot and tsar of the desert because the cross over his grave is visible to caravans thirty-forty miles away and reigns over the wasteland. ~ Anton Chekhov

Ivanov: No, my clever young thing, it's not a question of romance. I say as before God that I will endure everything - depression and mental illness and ruin and the loss of my wife and premature old age and loneliness - but I cannot tolerate, cannot endure being ridiculous in my own eyes. I'm dying of shame at the thought that I, a healthy, strong man, have turned into some sort of Hamlet or Manfred, some sort of 'superfluous man' ... devil knows precisely what!
There are pitiful people who are flattered by being called Hamlet or superfluous men, but for me it's a disgrace! It stirs up my pride, I'm overcome by shame and I suffer ... ~ Anton Chekhov

What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create? ~ Anton Chekhov

A certain percentage, they tell us, must every year go... that way... to the devil, I suppose, so that the rest may remain chaste, and not be interfered with. ~ Anton Chekhov

In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments. ~ Anton Chekhov

Life's all done, just as if I never even lived it ... ~ Anton Chekhov

Ivanov: A naive man is a fool. But you women are clever enough to be naive so that it comes out in you as engaging and healthy and warm, and not so silly as it might seem. Only why do you all behave like this? While a man is healthy and strong and in good spirits, you pay him no attention, but as soon as he rolls down the slippery slope and starts complaining about his woes, you hang on his neck. ~ Anton Chekhov

Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer. ~ Al Pacino

There is nothing good in this world that does not have some filth in its origin. ~ Anton Chekhov

The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can't return even if it wants to. ~ Anton Chekhov

I don't understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses. ~ Anton Chekhov

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. ~ Anton Chekhov

Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act. ~ Anton Chekhov

There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work! ~ Anton Chekhov

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are. ~ Salman Rushdie

I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it's tobacco, then let it be tobacco. ~ Anton Chekhov

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be. ~ Anton Chekhov

The bourgeoisie loves so-called " positive " types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one's innocence , to be a beast and still be happy . ~ Anton Chekhov

He who doesn't know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs. ~ Anton Chekhov

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles. ~ Annette Bening

The theatre was the chief and most important thing in life and that it was only through the drama that one could derive true enjoyment and become cultivated and humane. ~ Anton Chekhov

Lvov: Now explain, give me an account of how it is that you, an intelligent, honest, almost saintly woman, have allowed yourself to be so brazenly deceived, to be dragged into this owl's nest. Why are you here? What have you in common with this cold, heartless ... but let's forget your husband
what do you have in common with this empty vulgar milieu? ~ Anton Chekhov

for a crippled man like me , personal happiness was possible only in dreams. ~ Anton Chekhov

Hundreds of versts of desolate, monotonous, sun-parched steppe cannot bring on the depression induced by one man who sits and talks, and gives no sign of ever going. ~ Anton Chekhov

Even while lying, you'll be believed if you speak with authority. ~ Anton Chekhov

The inner life of the [imagination], and not the personal and tiny experiential resources of the actor, should be elaborated on the stage and shown to the audience. This life is rich and revealing for the audience as well as for the actor himself. ~ Michael Chekhov

What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom! ~ Anton Chekhov

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say. ~ Chad Harbach

Lizaveta was a dwarfish creature, "not five foot within a wee bit, ~ Anton Chekhov

My holy of holies is the human body. ~ Anton Chekhov

I can always do theater; I can do Ibsen, I can do Macbeth, I can do Chekhov, I can do Moliere, Othello, I can do Richard III. ~ Ving Rhames

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts. ~ Anton Chekhov

Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it. ~ Anton Chekhov

All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: 'Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!' ~ Anton Chekhov

And you know that anyone who at least once in his life has caught a perch or seen blackbirds migrating in the fall, when they rush in flocks over the village on clear, cool days, is no longer a townsman, and will be drawn towards freedom till his dying day. ~ Anton Chekhov

Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is. ~ Anton Chekhov

Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one. ~ Anton Chekhov

Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty. ~ Anton Chekhov

But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: "My work is literature." ~ Anton Chekhov

True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know. ~ Anton Chekhov

Who loved without any genuine feeling, with superfluous phrases, affectedly, hysterically, with an expression that suggested that it was not love nor passion, but something more significant; ... ~ Anton Chekhov

My friend, healthy and normal people are only the common herd. ~ Anton Chekhov

When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.' ~ Anton Chekhov

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible. ~ Anton Chekhov

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people. ~ Anton Chekhov

I love him, love him. He's a millstone round my neck - he'll take me to the bottom with him. But I love this millstone of mine - I can't live without it. ~ Anton Chekhov

the Church is a kingdom not of this world.' If it is not of this world, then it cannot exist on earth at all. In the Gospel, the words 'not of this world' are not used in that sense. To play with such words is indefensible. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to set up the Church upon earth. The Kingdom of Heaven, of course, is not of this world, but in Heaven; but it is only entered through the Church which has been founded and established upon earth. And so a frivolous play upon words in such a connection is unpardonable and improper. The Church is, in truth, a kingdom and ordained to rule, and in the end must undoubtedly become the kingdom ruling over all the earth. For that we have the divine promise." He ~ Anton Chekhov

You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants. ~ Anton Chekhov

and that she had shown marked abilities in that direction, so that many people began to say that she was no better than a Jew. It was not that she lent money on interest, but it was known, for instance, that ~ Anton Chekhov

It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it. ~ Anton Chekhov

When you look for a long time into the deep sky, without taking your eyes away, your thoughts and soul merge for some reason in an awareness of loneliness. You begin to feel yourself irremediably alone, and all that you once considered close and dear becomes infinitely distant and devoid of value. ~ Anton Chekhov

With total rapture and delight he talks about the birds which he can see from his prison window, and which he had never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now of course, after he's been released, he doesn't notice the birds anymore, just as beforehand. In the same way you won't notice Moscow, when you actually live there. ~ Anton Chekhov

Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly ... ~ Anton Chekhov

Great Jove angry is no longer Jove. ~ Anton Chekhov