Chekhov Plays Quotes & Sayings

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. — Gene Wilder

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

[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

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit. — Anton Chekhov

Flies purify the air, and plays--the morals. — Anton Chekhov

If you asked me what Uncle Vanya is about, I would say about as much as I can take. — Robert Garland

Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere. — Terry Teachout

I thought I would spent my career doing Chekhov and Ibsen in regional theaters, so the fact that I started doing new plays was a whole new world I didn't expect, and that I would like to keep doing. — Zeljko Ivanek

Going to see plays isn't what you people should do. Try looking at yourselves a little more often and see what gray lives you all lead. How much of what you say is unnecessary. — Anton Chekhov

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

MASHA. Just think, I am already beginning to forget her face. People will not remember us either. They will forget.
VERSHININ. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence. — Anton Chekhov

In his 1973 "literary investigation," The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn exposed the practices of the Soviet penal system: "If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the 'secret brand'); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums. — Donnie Eichar

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

Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don't know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hardand tortuous to write a bad one. — Anton Chekhov

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. — Tom Stoppard

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. — Rainn Wilson

You know I can't stand Shakespeare's plays, but yours are even worse. — Leo Tolstoy

LUBOV. I'm quite sure there wasn't anything at all funny. You oughtn't to go and see plays, you ought to go and look at yourself. What a grey life you lead, what a lot you talk unnecessarily. — Anton Chekhov

Because in the end, we die. It's like Chekhov observed in so many of his plays: 'in two hundred years, no one will even know we were here. — Zack Love