Chekhov Quotes

Chekhov Quote of the day

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist.

I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most.

Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.

No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.

Chekhov, when it's done well and you're ready for it, can actually be quite funny.

I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.

I did Chekhov's Three Sisters once. Two months in, I remember going, "Human beings shouldn't be forced to do or watch this play every night." It's so dark and so bottomless.

Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary.

I saw Chekhov a number of times in English, and I thought that it translates very well in English, for some reason, from the Russian to the English.

I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.

As Michael (Chekhov)'s pupil, I learned more about acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art - taste.

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

Im always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

It's very important to set your place in a concrete environment. I think Chekhov said that the important thing when you have a play or any kind of novel is to set the roots in a concrete place.

Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy.

Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.

One of the things that made me want to be an actor more than ever was seeing a Chekhov play, "The Sea Gull," when was 14 in the Bronx.

Educate yourself, welcome life's messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts.

For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.

I did [Henrik] Ibsen and [Anton] Chekhov for years. Obviously I didn't get the kind of recognition I have now. Somebody once told me, "You ride the horse the direction it's going."

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

I'll take a [Pavel] Chekhov comparison any day! He's of course one of the great masters at the short story form, and has helped define traditional conflict as we understand it.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people like the Chekhov story The Lady With the Little Dog.

The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.

I see this quality [real interest and joy] in the work of [Pavel] Chekhov, of course, and [Alexei] Tolstoy and really just about any great writer.

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

When you snatch happiness in little bits, fits and starts, and lose it, like me, you become coarse, little by little, you become hateful.

I've never been in love, never in my life.Oh, I've dreamed of love, dreamed endlessly, day and night, but my soul is like a fine piano that's locked, and the key is lost.

Any idiot can face a crisis

Don't tell me the moon is shining