Top 137 Chekhov Quotes & Sayings

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.

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

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

I did a film called 'Days and Nights,' which is a modern-day retelling of and inspired by Chekhov's 'The Seagull.'

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

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.

All of modern acting comes from Stanislavski, who was the Russian partner to Chekhov. When Chekhov was writing his plays, Stanislavski was running his theater. And Stanislavski really was the first inventor of modern acting and then everything that came out of the method and Stella Adler and the great teachers really came out of him.

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.'

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

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.

I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.

Chekhov would have been an excellent screenwriter. He is singularly good at dipping in and out of a group of people's lives, like Robert Altman did.

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.

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

Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.

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

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.

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.

I really like the stuff that is very absurd and very real at the same time. I think Anton Chekhov is the greatest comedy writer of all time. I think he would make a great addition to The Office staff. If you look through Chekhov plays there is a lot of awkward pauses in there. His mixture of pathos, absurdity, truthfulness and whimsy is just mixed together perfectly.

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."

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.

I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.

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

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

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

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

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.

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

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.

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

I can always do theater; I can do Ibsen, I can do Macbeth, I can do Chekhov, I can do Moliere, Othello, I can do Richard III.

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.

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'm 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.

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.

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

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.

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.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Anton Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

If you're sitting around and doing Chekhov and the cat walks in, you must pay attention to the cat. You cannot continue the dialogue of Chekhov without including the cat. So on live television, we'd automatically go into ad-lib gear.

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.

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

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

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.

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

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.

Moliere and Arthur Miller affected me at a very young age. In adulthood, I became overwhelmed by Chekhov. Those are my big theatrical influences.

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

Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.

Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

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

I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

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.