The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.
More Quotes from Anton Pavlovich Chekhov:
But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone 'My work is literature.'Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
'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.'
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
He was a rationalist, but he had to confess that he liked the ringing of church bells.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings, and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging. The horse's skin quivers, it waves its tail. What is the fly buzzing about It probably doesn't know itself. It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt 'I'm alive, too, you know' it seems to say. 'Look, I know how to buzz, there's nothing I can't buzz about' I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
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Based on Topics: Art QuotesBased on Keywords: voltaire
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