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Oh, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read - my own or other people's works - it all seems to me not short enough.

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
People
Shortness
Mania
Short
Works
Whatever
Read
Seems

More quotes by Anton Chekhov

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You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.
Anton Chekhov
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I can't accept our nervous age, since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.
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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It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.
Anton Chekhov
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Write, write, write-till your fingers break.
Anton Chekhov
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Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say, 'You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.'
Anton Chekhov
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And it is the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid!
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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I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
Anton Chekhov
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The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
Anton Chekhov
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The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can't return even if it wants to.
Anton Chekhov
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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.
Anton Chekhov
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Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.
Anton Chekhov
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I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it's tobacco, then let it be tobacco.
Anton Chekhov
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Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they'll find a means to be happy.
Anton Chekhov
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A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.
Anton Chekhov
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In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger - a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...
Anton Chekhov
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If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.
Anton Chekhov