Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth29 January 1860
CityTaganrog, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions,
A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.
To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.
There are people whom even children's literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.
The air of one's native country is the most healthy air.
Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, andamong youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice.... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.
When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.
You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.
If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.
An artist's flair is sometimes worth a scientist's brains.
You will not become a saint through other people's sins.