Anton Chekhov

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything through my infidelity.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels; we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

Man is what he believes.

People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.

The only difference between lawyers and doctors is that lawyers simply rob you, whereas doctors both rob you and kill you, too.

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil.

YOU ASK ME WHAT LIFE IS. THAT’S LIKE ASKING WHAT A CARROT IS. A CARROT IS A CARROT, AND THERE’S NOTHING MORE TO KNOW.

DON’T TELL ME THE MOON IS SHINING; SHOW ME THE GLINT OF LIGHT ON BROKEN GLASS.

MEDVEDENKO : Why do you wear black all the time?

When you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder—it gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold.

You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.