Chekhov Quotes - Page 2

• 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.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Stories, Conflict, Form

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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

  Harvey Korman

  Ibsen

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• There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.

  August Wilson

  Writing, Men, Who I Am

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• 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.

  Sam Mendes

  Play, Classic, Novel

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

  Graham Greene

  Dog, Book, Writing

  Graham Greene (1973). “Collected Stories”

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• Like the characters in Chekhov, they have no reserves -– you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

  Graham Greene

  Character, Stupidity, Secret

  Graham Greene (1982). “Another Mexico”, Viking Adult

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• When we remove the snowdrift piled up over Chekhov in recent years, we uncover a man profoundly agitated by social problems; a writer whose social ideals are the same as those we live by; a philosophy of the divinity of man, of fervent faith in man - the faith that moves mountains.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

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• [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.

  Robert Dessaix

  Play, People, World

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

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• 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.

  Isabelle Huppert

  Numbers, Saws, Reason

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• Chekhov's stories are about the moment that a life goes off the rails and the price that will be paid - forever. That's a typical Chekhov story for you. Something that you're used to lying in bed worrying about at four in the morning, before you have the psychic defenses to kid yourself and tell yourself to get up and shower and go to the office.

  Lorin Stein

  Morning, Lying, Kids

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'll never forget reading Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end - the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him - and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon's top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let's just hope market forces don't send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate.

  Adam Ross

  Goodbye, New York, Flower

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

  David Mamet

  Writing, Play, Long

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• The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.

  Cornel West

  Reading, Sitting, Alive

  Source: genius.com

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

  Marilyn Monroe

  Art, Psychology, Good Man

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• Ivan and Misha is the great American Russian Novel told as Chekhov would tell it, in stories of delicacy, humanity, and insight. From Kiev to Manhattan, Brighton Beach and Bellevue, Michael Alenyikov lays out a series of compelling arguments for brotherhood between brothers, between lovers, between men from an old country. Alenyikov confronts big subjects—illness and madness, sex and love in the age of AIDS, old and new world values, a fallen wall, the metaphysics of survival, the march of generations.

  Carolyn Cooke

  Country, Beach, Brother

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• I’m not interested in teaching books by women.

  David Gilmour

  Real, Book, Teaching

  "Canadian author David Gilmour sparks furore over female writers" by Liz Bury, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2013.

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• 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.

  Dagmara Dominczyk

  Eye, Theatre, Pieces

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• I wanted to go to New York and be a stage actress, doing things like Chekhov. None of that happened, and then I went to L.A. and an agent said, 'I think you belong in commercials and TV.' So I did that and got some opportunities that I absolutely love.

  Rachael Harris

  Love, New York, Opportunity

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Personally, I'd like as many children as I can pop out, I reckon. You come from a happy family; you want to create a happy family. And in the same breath, I'd like to be on stage at England's National Theatre, doing Miller and Chekhov. Give me a Sam Mendes/Tennessee Williams combination-that would be glorious. And to be making some Oscar-worthy movies with Scorsese. I'm always looking for the hard road. That way, you remain interested and interesting. Hopefully.

  Emilia Clarke

  Children, Giving, Interesting

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• Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.

  William Faulkner

  Mean, Stories, Crafts

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• The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.

  Leon Edel

  Death, House, Mind

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• 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.

  Edward Albee

  Going Away, Unions, Stuff

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• According to Chekhov," Tamaru said, rising from his chair, "once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired." "Meaning what?" "Meaning, don't bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.

  Haruki Murakami

  Writing, Gun, Stories

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• 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.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Character, Men, Honest

  FaceBook post by Orhan Pamuk from Mar 27, 2012

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• 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.

  Orson Welles

  Play, Extras, Walking

  "Orson Welles: The Unfulfilled Promise" by Barbara Leaming, The New York Times, July 14, 1985.

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