Best 26 quotes in «chekhov quotes» category

You're an intelligent educated man. You can see it's not thieves or fires that destroy the world; it's hatred, hostility, all this petty squabbling...Shouldn't you stop complaining and try to make peace?

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

The world is created well enough, only why and with what right do people, thought Yergunov, divide their fellows into the sober and the drunken, the employed and the dismissed, and so on. Why do the sober and well fed sleep comfortably in their homes while the drunken and the hungry must wander about the country without a refuge? Why was it that if anyone had not a job and did not get a salary he had to go hungry, without clothes and boots? Whose idea was it? Why was it the birds and the wild beasts in the woods did not have jobs and get salaries, but lived as they pleased? - The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most.

Im always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

I'll take a [Pavel] Chekhov comparison any day! He's of course one of the great masters at the short story form, and has helped define traditional conflict as we understand it.

I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.

I saw Chekhov a number of times in English, and I thought that it translates very well in English, for some reason, from the Russian to the English.

I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts.

Master Chekhov says Man is what he believes. From here we conclude that when Man believes in a crap, Man becomes a crap!

There are no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.

Anton Chekhov tells the truth neither out of love or respect for the truth, nor yet because, in the Kantian manner, a high duty bids him never to tell a lie, even to escape death. Neither has he the impulse which so often pushes young and fiery souls into rashness: that desire to stand erect, to keep the head high. On the contrary, Chekhov always walks with a stoop, his head bent down, never fixing his eyes on the heavens, since he will read no signs there. If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps.

You have to teach yourself to act but Michael Chekhov will give you the necessary tools - and for me, Psychological Gesture and Centers are extremely valuable They work like a charm. I've used them all along and still do.

Behind him the door creaked open. He spun round, clutching the sack to him, and saw three very sombrely dressed women watching him carefully. One of them was holding a kitchen knife in a trembling hand, 'Have you come here to ravish us?' she said. 'Madam! I'm being pursued by werewolves!' The three looked at one another. To Vimes the sack suddenly seemed far too small. 'Er, vill that take you all day?' said one of the women. Vimes held the sack more tightly. 'Ladies! Please! I need trousers!' 'Ve can see that.' 'And a weapon, and boots if you've got them! Please?' They went into another huddle. 'We have the gloomy and purposeless trousers of Uncle Vanya,' said one, doubtfully. 'He seldom wore them,' said another.

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication.

If you asked me what Uncle Vanya is about, I would say about as much as I can take.

If he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. He would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does Schiller's, or Dostoevsky's, or even Socrates’, whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie.

If we moved to Bonk we could get a big apartment for the cost of this place—' 'This is our home, Irina,' said the oldest sister. 'Ah, a home of lost illusions and thwarted hopes...' 'We could go out dancing and everything.' 'I remember when we lived in Bonk,' said the middle sister dreamily. 'Things vere better then.' 'Things vere alvays better then,' said the oldest sister. The youngest sister sighed and looked out of the window. She gasped. 'There's a man running through the cherry orchard!' 'A man? Vot could he possibly vant?' The youngest sister strained to see. 'It looks like he wants... a pair of trousers...' 'Ah,' said the middle sister dreamily. 'Trousers ver better then.

Mustering the figurative glint of light on Chekhov's broken glass, he gazed into the half-remembered irises of Florence's eyes and imagined her fingers, soft and delicate, against his cheek.