Quote

I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.

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
Play
Four
Female
Male
Frightfully
Writing
Talk
View
Acts
Considerable
Love
Though
Views
Males
Tons
Action
Comedy
Landscape
November
Three
Stage
Lots
Lake
Ends
Probably
Six
Conventions
Littles
Pleasure
Parts
Lakes
Little
Literature
Sin
Finish

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Write only of what is important and eternal.
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When you're thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean that's faith when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two that's science.
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If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
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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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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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Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship or respect than common hatred toward something.
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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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To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people's consciousness, the people's conscience, freedom andso forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen--this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.
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It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment.
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One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
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Flies purify the air, and plays - the morals.
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Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.
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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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Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.
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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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..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.
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When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself - hence the war with what he does not understand.
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When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.
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Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.
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After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, Oh! Life is so hard! and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
Anton Chekhov