Chekhov Quotes - Page 3

• I wasnt a Star Trek fan, yet I knew who all the characters were. that goes to show what an impact the show had not just in entertainment but in life. I knew who Chekhov was and I knew who Kirk and Spock were, although I probably had never seen the show.

  Marina Sirtis

  Stars, Character, Impact

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• Chekhov said: let's put God - and all these grand progressive ideas - to one side. Let's begin with man; let's be kind and attentive to the individual man - whether he's a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands, or a waiter in a restaurant. Let's begin with respect, compassion, and love for the individual - or we'll never get anywhere.

  Vasily Grossman

  Men, Compassion, Islands

  Vasily Grossman (2011). “Life And Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)”, p.267, Random House

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

  George Saunders

  Story Writers, Stories, Blunt

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• 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.

  David Bailey

  Character, Play, Actors

  "This Much I Know: David Bailey" by Alice Fisher, www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2010.

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

  Salman Rushdie

  Somewhere Else, Wish, Isolation

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

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Character, Emphasis, Pathetic

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1981). “Lectures on Russian literature”, Harcourt

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• Acting became important. It became an art that belonged to the actor, not to the director or producer, or the man whose money had bought the studio. It was an art that transformed you into somebody else, that increased your life and mind. I had always loved acting and tried hard to learn it. But with Michael Chekhov, acting became more than a profession to me. It became a sort of religion.

  Marilyn Monroe

  Inspiring, Art, Men

  Marilyn Monroe, Ben Hecht (2006). “My Story”, p.171, Rowman & Littlefield

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• I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

  Vladimir Putin

  Reading, Literature, Modern

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• Russia is a place of great culture. If you've read Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov...the culture of the great Russian literature is amazing. The human narrative you get out of "War and Peace" is universal.

  Andre Leon Talley

  War, Russia, Culture

  Source: wwd.com

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• I come from the theatre where there are no boundaries to the style you're doing; you're doing Molière, then you're doing Chekhov and then you're doing Arthur Miller in a season and no-one bats an eye.

  Mark Ruffalo

  Eye, Style, Theatre

  "Mark Ruffalo talks Spotlight, Thor: Ragnarok and Columbo". Interview with Phil De Semlyen, www.empireonline.com. February 1, 2016.

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• Chekhov used to correspond with aspiring writers, and once he gave this advice to Maxim Gorky when he was encouraging him to pare his wordy sentences: "When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace." The short story, by definition, embodies this notion of grace, because it requires such forceful compression to achieve its effects.

  Catherine Brady

  Advice, Grace, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Chad Harbach

  Influence, Huge, Hard

  Source: www.gq.com

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

  John Cameron Mitchell

  Revolutionary, Beckett, Ibsen

  "Ruth Wilson". Interview with John Cameron Mitchell, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 31, 2016.

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• How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

  Adam Hochschild

  Russia, Political, Revolution

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I had a very sparse comic upbringing - not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Reading, Holiday, Kids

  "Benedict Cumberbatch Explains How He Was Enticed Into "Doctor Strange". Interview with Peter Sciretta, www.slashfilm.com. September 27, 2016.

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• 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.

  George Saunders

  Real, Joy, Quality

  Source: sojo.net

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• I was deeply influenced by the sartorial practices of both preachers and jazz musicians and actually Masha in Act One of Anton Chekhov, my favorite writer's master piece,Three Sisters,when she arrives reflecting on whether they're ever going to get to Moscow, memories of the death of their father, and she's in black, and she says I'm in mourning for the world, saying in part that I have a sad soul and a cheerful disposition.

  Cornel West

  Memories, Father, Practice

  "Cornel West, 'Living And Loving Out Loud'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. October 29, 2009.

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

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Cost, Becoming, Welcome

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• I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.

  Neil Simon

  New York, Home, Character

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• In Chekhov, when people leave, a carriage is taking them away forever. The stakes are so high just for someone to make a simple exit. And now we have all this access to public transportation, automobiles and jets and the Internet; we're so easily distracted, but the world is still designed to destroy you. It just happens quicker and faster now.

  Adam Rapp

  Simple, People, Forever

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• The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

  Vanessa Redgrave

  Laughter, Drama, Character

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• By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Dark

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

  Alice Neel

  Artist, Soul, Portraiture

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• I did The Seagull, the Chekhov play, on Broadway, a couple of years ago, and I had done it in London, and I became completely obsessed with the character, Nina, that I played in that. She's an actress. I couldn't find a play after that, that I wanted to do, because I couldn't think of doing anything else. Every part is a disappointment, once you've done that part.

  Carey Mulligan

  Couple, Disappointment, Character

  Source: collider.com

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

  Vera Farmiga

  Done, Wells, Ready

  "Q&A: Bates Motel's Vera Farmiga on the Terrors of Parenthood". Interview with Eric Spitznagel, www.esquire.com. February 1, 2014.

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