Quotes About Chekhov

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

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#2. I'm 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.

Dagmara Dominczyk

#3. Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.

Vivian Gornick

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

Alice Neel

#5. Chekhov, when it's done well and you're ready for it, can actually be quite funny.

Vera Farmiga

#6. One of the things that made me want to be an actor more than ever was seeing a Chekhov play, "The Sea Gull," when was 14 in the Bronx.

Al Pacino

#7. Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

Eudora Welty

#8. Any idiot can face a crisis, it is day to day living that wears you out. - Anton Chekhov

Anonymous

#9. Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.

Tom Stoppard

#10. For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.

Orhan Pamuk

#11. Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru said.

Haruki Murakami

#12. I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.

Neil Simon

#13. Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.

Terry Teachout

#14. I wanted to go to New York and be a stage actress, doing things like Chekhov. None of that happened, and then I went to L.A. and an agent said, 'I think you belong in commercials and TV.' So I did that and got some opportunities that I absolutely love.

Rachael Harris

#15. I thought I would spent my career doing Chekhov and Ibsen in regional theaters, so the fact that I started doing new plays was a whole new world I didn't expect, and that I would like to keep doing.

Zeljko Ivanek

#16. 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.

Vladimir Putin

#17. My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

Gene Wilder

#18. Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.
(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)

Anton Chekhov

#19. Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp

Gabrielle Zevin

#20. It should, as Chekhov said, prepare us for tenderness. And in this regard it starts, I think, with intention ... Our intention is to crack life open for just a second.

George Saunders

#21. An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.'

Claire Messud

#22. Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

Al Pacino

#23. English country life is more like Chekhov than 'The Archers' or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

Jane Gardam

#24. Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie.

Wallace Stegner

#25. I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

Orson Welles

#26. Chekhov. Well he was a bit of a lad. He had at least two dozen relationships, possibly three; some of them long term; most of the woman wanted to marry him and throughout that time he was still a constant frequenter of brothels. '
'Mercy. It's a wonder he got time to write at all.

Ray Harris

#27. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout

Yuval Noah Harari

#28. Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

Salman Rushdie

#29. When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#30. 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

#31. By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#32. In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. 35

Amos Oz

#33. I did a film called 'Days and Nights,' which is a modern-day retelling of and inspired by Chekhov's 'The Seagull.'

Juliet Rylance

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

Harvey Korman

#35. 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

#36. 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.

Tom Hardy

#37. 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.

Edward Albee

#38. 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

#39. In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

Tom Stoppard

#40. Because in the end, we die. It's like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: 'in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here.

Zack Love

#41. I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#42. I realized that after years of studying Shakespeare and Chekhov and regional repertory theater, what I really wanted to do was bust in and rob a bank and jump in the screaming getaway car and tear through the city and get in a shootout.

M. C. Gainey

#43. [Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

Robert Dessaix

#44. Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.

Robert Wilson

#45. The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.

George Steiner

#46. I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.

Antonio Lobo Antunes

#47. [The Writer silently passes her a pint bottle of whiskey.] Thank you, Mr.
?
WRITER: Chekhov! Anton Pavlovitch Chekhov!
MRS HARDWICKE-MOORE [smiling with the remnants of coquetry]: Thank you, Mr.
Chekhov.

Tennessee Williams

#48. My parents didn't take me to the theatre to see Chekhov when I was growing up - we went to see 'Francie and Josie' once every five years.

Peter Capaldi

#49. I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

Tobias Wolff

#50. Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

Tom Stoppard

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

Chad Harbach

#52. It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them.

Haruki Murakami

#53. I wasn't a 'Star Trek' fan, yet I knew who all the characters were. that goes to show what an impact the show had not just in entertainment but in life. I knew who Chekhov was and I knew who Kirk and Spock were, although I probably had never seen the show.

Marina Sirtis

#54. I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

John Logan

#55. I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

Tom Stoppard

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

George Saunders

#57. Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy.

Robert Wilson Lynd

#58. 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.

Sam Mendes

#59. I love Paul Giamatti - God, that man is like a walking Chekhov. His connection to humanity is unbelievable, and those feelings of low self-esteem - the way that all comes together on the screen? Delicious.

Gary Shteyngart

#60. As Michael (Chekhov)'s pupil, I learned more about acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art - taste.

Marilyn Monroe

#61. The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.

Leon Edel

#62. I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.

Rick Perlstein

#63. It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

Clive Sinclair

#64. "Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."

Anton Chekhov

#65. When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

Akhil Sharma

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

Uta Hagen

#67. Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov ... the written word is not sacrosanct.

Alan Arkin

#68. I did [Henrik] Ibsen and [Anton] Chekhov for years. Obviously I didn't get the kind of recognition I have now. Somebody once told me, "You ride the horse the direction it's going."

Joe Manganiello

#69. It's very important to set your place in a concrete environment. I think Chekhov said that the important thing when you have a play or any kind of novel is to set the roots in a concrete place.

Roman Polanski

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#71. Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

David Bailey

#72. One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.

Tom Stoppard

#73. 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.

Clint Eastwood

#74. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru

Haruki Murakami

#75. We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. - ANTON CHEKHOV

Stacy Schiff

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

Tom Stoppard

#77. Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.

Tom Stoppard

#78. The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.

Cornel West

#79. Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

#80. When I was at drama school in the U.K., I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, 'We've taught you Chekhov and Shakespeare; you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial.'

James Callis

#81. I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#82. Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

Kurt Vonnegut

#83. In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

Bernadette Peters

#84. In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.

Elena Ferrante

#85. According to Chekhov, once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.

Haruki Murakami

#86. You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.

Katherine Parkinson

#87. Life is a soap bubble, says Chekhov. And mine just burst.

Nicolas Barreau

#88. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Cynthia Ozick

#89. astonished-looking eyes.

Anton Chekhov

#90. She is far above the crowd! He, he, he ... and she doesn't reckon us as human beings.

Anton Chekhov

#91. A man ought to be able to be carried away by his feelings, he ought to be able to be mad, to make mistakes, to suffer! A woman will forgive you audacity and insolence, but she will never forgive your reasonableness!

Anton Chekhov

#92. What's the point? To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for a narrow-minded or embittered man.

Anton Chekhov

#93. If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.

Anton Chekhov

#94. An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

Anton Chekhov

#95. It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don't just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.

Anton Chekhov

#96. The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

Anton Chekhov

#97. So far only one incontestable truth has been uttered about love: 'This is a great mystery.

Anton Chekhov

#98. Everyone has the same God; only people differ.

Anton Chekhov

#99. Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can.

Anton Chekhov

#100. In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don't seem to understand what I say.

Anton Chekhov