"She did not believe him and wanted now to understand his secret meaning. She never did believe any one, and however generous were their intentions, she always suspected some petty or ignoble motive or selfish object in them."

"Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage ... a family group: his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the rôle of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a clean-shaven, dropsical privy councillor, crafty and avaricious; his mother-in-law, a stout lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in everything; if her daughter were strangling some one, the mother would not have protested, but would only have screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small predatory-looking features, but more expressive and bolder than her mother's; she was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale!"

"His landlady, the widow, was out. She had gone off somewhere to hire horses and carts to move next day to town. Profiting by the absence of her severe mamma, her daughter Katya, aged twenty, had for a long time been sitting in the young man's room. Next day the painter was going away, and she had a great deal to say to him. She kept talking, talking, and yet she felt that she had not said a tenth of what she wanted to say. With her eyes full of tears, she gazed at his shaggy head, gazed at it with rapture and sadness."

"When Katya began whimpering, he looked severely at her from his overhanging eyebrows, frowned, and said in a heavy, deep bass: "I cannot marry." "Why not?" Katya asked softly. "Because for a painter, and in fact any man who lives for art, marriage is out of the question. An artist must be free." "But in what way should I hinder you, Yegor Savvitch?" "I am not speaking of myself, I am speaking in general." ". . . Famous authors and painters have never married.""

"One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work."

"He who constantly swims in the ocean loves dry land."

"We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of."

"Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable."

"Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat."

"When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace."

":Надо, чтобы за дверью каждого довольного, счастливого человека стоял кто-нибудь с молоточком и постоянно напоминал бы стуком, что есть несчастные..."

"Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric."

"She was an energetic, genuine girl, with convictions, and it was interesting to listen to her, though she talked a great deal and in a loud voice--perhaps because she was accustomed to talking at school. On the other hand, Pyotr Petrovitch, who had retained from his student days the habit of turning every conversation into an argument, was tedious, flat, long-winded, and unmistakably anxious to appear clever and advanced."

"The two that I feel I have most responded to, and probably because they have lived through, and been inspired by, times of crisis, are Chekhov and Babel. Growing up at a tilt time in India's history, during the period of India's nation-building, I was living and witnessing the struggles of Chekhovian characters. Social change-momentous, scary change-was inevitable. How adaptable was my traditional family to such mega-scale change? Chekhov's fiction really spoke to me."

"In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments."

"I drank so much in Peter that Russia should be proud of me!"

"There are no lower or higher or median moralities. There is only one morality, and it is precisely the one that was given to us during the time of Jesus Christ and that stops me, you and Barantsevich from stealing, offending others, lying etc."

"Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport."

"When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand."

"Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms."

"I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me."

"When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is."

"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 hard and tortuous to write a bad one."

"Beware of exquisite language. The language should be simple and elegant."

"Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is."

"Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields."

"Brevity is the sister of talent."

"Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it."

"One can only call that youth healthful which refuses to be reconciled to old ways and which, foolishly or shrewdly, combats the old. This is nature’s charge and all progress hinges upon it."

"Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material."

"Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at."

"In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish—that is their strength."

"We learn about life not from pluses alone, but from minuses as well."

"I don’t care for success. The ideas sitting in my head are annoyed by, and envious of, that which I’ve already written."

"It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth."

"Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress."

"It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand."

"An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes."

"You are right to demand that an artist engage his work consciously, but you confuse two different things: solving the problem and correctly posing the question."

"A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees. Forests create climate, climate influences peoples’ character, and so on and so forth. There can be neither civilization nor happiness if forests crash down under the axe, if the climate is harsh and severe, if people are also harsh and severe.... What a terrible future!"

"There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you’re angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you’re asked."

"He who doesn’t know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others’ successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs."

"I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands."

"Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure."

"The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!"

"The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships."

"I don’t know why one can’t chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue."

"I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one."

"One must speak about serious things seriously."

"Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state."