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I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

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
Divide
Divides
Categories
Literary
Exists
Works
Two
Criterion
Like
Criteria

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.
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Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
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Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.
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The sea has neither meaning nor pity.
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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!
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Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
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It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
Anton Chekhov
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People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
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.
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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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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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 man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.
Anton Chekhov
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It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature 2. total objectivity 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects 4. extreme brevity 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype 6. compassion.
Anton Chekhov
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Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.
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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If you can't distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn't undertake philanthropic work.
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