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.
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.
I don’t care for success. The ideas sitting in my head are annoyed by, and envious of, that which I’ve already written.
I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands.
Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.
For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.
One must speak about serious things seriously.
Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
Flies purify the air, and plays – the morals.
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given.
I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.
Do you remember you shot a seagull? A man came by chance, saw it and destroyed it, just to pass the time.
What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?
It is always “Youth, youth,” when there is nothing else to be said.
Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.
Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.
A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.
I should think I’m going to be a perpetual student.
When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean-that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses-that is science.
Once a man gets a fixed idea, there’s nothing to be done.