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

I don't like being successful; the subjects which sit in my head are annoyed and jealous of what has already been written.

A fiancé is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

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.