I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?

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 have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.

You ask me what life is. That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know.

Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.

Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.