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In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.

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
Enough
Much
Short
Stories
Better

More quotes by 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.
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Once a man gets a fixed idea, there's nothing to be done.
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Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.
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People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
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I've noticed that people who get married cease to be curious.
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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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Man will become better when you show him what he is like.
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What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.
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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.
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Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.
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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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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.
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It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
Anton Chekhov
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No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
Anton Chekhov
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I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.
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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Writers are as jealous as pigeons.
Anton Chekhov
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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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[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.
Anton Chekhov
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Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.
Anton Chekhov