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Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Anton Chekhov

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Anton Chekhov
Age: 44 †
Born: 1860
Born: January 1
Died: 1904
Died: January 1
Author
Dramaturge
Journalist
Novelist
Physician
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Writer
Tahanroh
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Antón Pávlovič Čéhov
Antón Pávlovich Chékhov
Chekhov
Science
Mistress
Night
Medical
Profession
Medicine
Tired
Spend
Wife
Literature
Lawful

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The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.
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Women can't forgive failure.
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Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.
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One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions.
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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.
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I can't accept our nervous age, since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.
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The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.
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Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.
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It is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.
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A fiancé is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
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What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won't seem important at all.
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A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.
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And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!
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When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.
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I don't like being successful the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.
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Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they'll find a means to be happy.
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God's world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!
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Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far asblather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.
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You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.
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The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.
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