Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.

If you cry ''Forward'' you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don't you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.