WednesdayMar 25, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Love, friendship, respect, will never unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.
We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.
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.
To a chemist there is nothing impure on earth. The writer should be just as objective as the chemist; he should liberate himself from everyday subjectivity and acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones.
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.'
The university brings out all abilities including incapability.
One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.
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.
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.
When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder that seems to give a kind of background to another's grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold.... The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make.
The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
'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.'
A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscience and his sense of duty.
A litterateur is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer.... He is just like an ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter, because of his fastidiousness or from a wish to give pleasure to his readers, were to describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroad contractors.
Another piece of advice: when you read proof cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out. It is comprehensible when I write: 'The man sat on the grass,' becaus
You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.
I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view I change it every month and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with humans it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.
I am dying. I haven't drunk champagne for a long time.
If you cry 'Forward!' you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don't you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monde and revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite?
Man will become better only when you will make him see what he is like.
There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man.
... only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones.... It's about time for writers particularly those who are genuine artists to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that alone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.
When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.
I think descriptions of nature should be very short and always be à propos. Commonplaces like 'The setting sun, sinking into the waves of the darkening sea, cast its purple gold rays, etc,' 'Swallows, flitting over the surface of the water, twittered gail
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.
It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.
Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty.
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean wherever my imagination ranges.
He was a rationalist, but he had to confess that he liked the ringing of church bells.
When a woman isn't beautiful, people always say:- You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.
The more refined one is, the more unhappy.
Man is what he believes.
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