Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904)
(Old Style: 17 January 1860 – 2 July 1904) was a major Russian short story writer and playwright.
A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.
No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.
The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!
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.
Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.
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.
I’m in mourning for my life.
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.
What writers influenced me as a young man? Chekhov! As a dramatist? Chekhov! As a story writer? Chekhov!
That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
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.