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Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.

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
States
Mind
Discuss
Make
Actions
Hero
Sure
Clear
State
Action

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one.
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I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
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If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.
Anton Chekhov
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A good person will feel guilty even before a dog.
Anton Chekhov
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But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: My work is literature.
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.
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If you wish women to love you be original I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter & women fell in love with him.
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I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?
Anton Chekhov
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It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.
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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A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.
Anton Chekhov
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This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
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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We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
Anton Chekhov
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To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.
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
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Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
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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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The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
Anton Chekhov