Quotes About Chekhov

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.

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

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

Throughout our marriage, we would go for weeks without exchanging more than perfunctory communications, sharing little but the bewildered quiet. And you think that I am lonely now? Heavens. I wish I'd listened to Chekhov, or had read him then: "If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

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

They discussed the war, the Occupation, and the future of an economically-shattered Japan ruled by an emperor who had announced that he was not, after all, a god. In the course of the conversation Kyosuke effortlessly quoted Chekhov, Chaucer, and Heine, though not in a pretentious way, and always with perfect relevance.

I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

With a play, when the curtain goes up and people are in garbage cans, I know I may admire the idea cerebrally, but it won't mean as much to me. I've seen Beckett, along with many lesser avant-gardists, and many contemporary plays, and I can say yes, that's clever and deep but I don't really care. But when I watch Chekhov or O'Neill--where it's men and women in human, classic crises--that I like.

I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

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.

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

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.

My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.

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 saw a sign for Book's with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft.

Amalia could hardly keep from crying as she threw out the butts from the ashtray: 'Nora, even drinking is better than smoking. It goes without saying that it's bad for you, but the smell is also disgusting! Chekhov said that kissing a woman who smokes is like licking an ashtray!' Nora dismissed her with a wave of the hand and said, laughing, 'Mama, Chekhov and I will never have to kiss anyway.

He reflects that Chekhov has already mapped out the route by which one can approach a strange lady by paying court to her lapdog.

A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos," Chekhov said—tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers "should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.

There are in life conjunctions of circumstances when the reproach that we are not Voltaires is least of all appropriate.

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

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.

Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.

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

There is usually something pretty odd about sisters that come in triplicate. Consider pretty little Cinderella and her ugly and dance-mad relations. Consider Chekhov's trio, high and dry in the provinces and longing gloomily for Moscow. Consider Macbeth's friends, bent keenly over the cauldron and intent on passing that Culinary Test for the Advanced Student.