Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904)
(Old Style: 17 January 1860 – 2 July 1904) was a major Russian short story writer and playwright.
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.
Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else’s opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.
Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.
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.
When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.
You ask “What is life?” That is the same as asking “What is a carrot?” A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.
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 man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately.
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.
Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.
To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.
Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.
That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!
All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.
I’m in mourning for my life.
An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.