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.
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!
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.
How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.
Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
My mother and father are the only people on the whole planet for whom I will never begrudge a thing. Should I achieve great things, it is the work of their hands; they are splendid people and their absolute love of their children places them above the highest praise. It cloaks all of their shortcomings, shortcomings that may have resulted from a difficult life.
After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!” and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
They say: "In the long run truth will triumph;" but it is untrue.
Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant.
When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters but telegrams.
It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.
Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.
As I shall lie in the grave alone, so in fact I live alone.
Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.
If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It’s better to live somehow than not at all.
People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
I don’t care for success. The ideas sitting in my head are annoyed by, and envious of, that which I’ve already written.
I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me.
Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.