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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
Writer
Cosmetic
Cosmetics
Entertainer
Dealer
Entertainers

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.
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Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
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To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.
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Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
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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.
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The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on science and art are as well.
Anton Chekhov
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There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.
Anton Chekhov
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A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.
Anton Chekhov
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The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
Anton Chekhov
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Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that all of our problems come fromsuch goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.
Anton Chekhov
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The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
Anton Chekhov
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Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.
Anton Chekhov
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Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one's mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at.
Anton Chekhov
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My love is like a stone tied round my neck it's dragging me down to the bottom but I love my stone. I can't live without it.
Anton Chekhov
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There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.
Anton Chekhov
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Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.
Anton Chekhov
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The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.
Anton Chekhov
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It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.
Anton Chekhov
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If you cry ''Forward'' you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?
Anton Chekhov
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Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
Anton Chekhov