It is as acceptable now to love the wives of others as it is to smoke their cigars and read their books.

What's the use of talking? You can see for yourself that this is a barbarous country; the people have no morals; and the boredom!

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.

I'm the seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress. That's it.

I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.

We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.