We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.

When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.

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.

Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who's spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.

Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.

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