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A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.

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
Cosmetic
Cosmetics
Entertainer
Dealer
Entertainers
Writer

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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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.
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One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.
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The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.
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The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
Anton Chekhov
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Even while lying, you'll be believed if you speak with authority.
Anton Chekhov
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There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined.
Anton Chekhov
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My holy of holies is the human body.
Anton Chekhov
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Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased.
Anton Chekhov
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I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.
Anton Chekhov
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I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.
Anton Chekhov
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You look boldly ahead isn't it only that you don't see or divine anything terrible in the future because life is still hidden from your young eyes.
Anton Chekhov
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When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.
Anton Chekhov
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What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country the people have no morals and the boredom!
Anton Chekhov
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Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.
Anton Chekhov
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I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.
Anton Chekhov
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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
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table what is national is no longer science.
Anton Chekhov
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Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.
Anton Chekhov
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These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
Anton Chekhov