I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

John Logan

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

Akhil Sharma

Life Family You

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.

Alan Arkin

You Written Word Written

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.

Alex Kingston

Life Ways Way

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

Annette Bening

Women Men Great

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.

Antonio Lobo Antunes

Patriotism Men Family

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

Bernadette Peters

Car Art Yin

In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.

Chang-Rae Lee

Home Wide Why

An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.'

Claire Messud

Wit Visible Up

It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style.

Clive Sinclair

Work Would Think

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Cynthia Ozick

Voice Up UN

I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

Dagmara Dominczyk

Were Ways Way

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

David Bailey

You Who Want

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

David Mamet

Poetry Good You

In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They'd come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I've got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don't sit around watching TV all the time.

Eddie Marsan

Time Family Who

If you're a woman doing classic theater, the big roles are often destroyers. I've played Hedda Gabler, Lady Macbeth, some of the Chekhovian heroines, Electra, Phaedra - they're all powerful women, but they're forces of negativity.

Eve Best

Women Power Men

I love Paul Giamatti - God, that man is like a walking Chekhov. His connection to humanity is unbelievable, and those feelings of low self-esteem - the way that all comes together on the screen? Delicious.

Gary Shteyngart

Love God Way

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

Gene Wilder

Tutor Ton Thor

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

George Saunders

Great Writer Write

I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.

Harvey Korman

T Played Play

When I was at drama school in the U.K., I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, 'We've taught you Chekhov and Shakespeare; you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial.'

James Callis

You Years Year

English country life is more like Chekhov than 'The Archers' or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

Jane Gardam

I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.

Jeffrey Tambor

I took a class in college... I think we were reading some short Chekhov plays, and I knew the first day of the class that I was going to be an actor. It was just the bizarrest thing, but it just felt like home.

Jeffrey Wright

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

John Logan

Because when you're in drama school, you're playing multiple characters at once. You know, in the morning you're doing a Chekhov play, and then you're doing a Shakespeare workshop midday.

Jonathan Majors

I went to a Chekhov play with my grandmother, and at the end, I was talking about how the first act was so boring. And my grandmother didn't see that at all. I realized it was because I need, like, the constant images changing. I wrote a paper about this.

Julia Stiles

I write tragedies and things when I'm alone. Chekhovian dramas.

Julian Barratt

I did a film called 'Days and Nights,' which is a modern-day retelling of and inspired by Chekhov's 'The Seagull.'

Juliet Rylance

I did Chekhov's 'Three Sisters' once. Two months in, I remember going, 'Human beings shouldn't be forced to do or watch this play every night.' It's so dark and so bottomless.

Justin Theroux

You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.

Katherine Parkinson

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.

Leon Edel

I realized that after years of studying Shakespeare and Chekhov and regional repertory theater, what I really wanted to do was bust in and rob a bank and jump in the screaming getaway car and tear through the city and get in a shootout.

M. C. Gainey

I wasn't a 'Star Trek' fan, yet I knew who all the characters were. that goes to show what an impact the show had not just in entertainment but in life. I knew who Chekhov was and I knew who Kirk and Spock were, although I probably had never seen the show.

Marina Sirtis

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

Martha MacCallum

I didn't want to do Chekhov or Shakespeare. So I switched my major from acting to costume design. Eventually, I got a job working as a wardrobe assistant for a theater company. I would dress the actors, fix their costumes, do the quick changes for them and all that stuff.

Nico Santos

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

Orson Welles

One of my favorite writers is Chekhov. I love his attitude toward the world. Just accept things for what they are. Don't judge. Be moral as you tell your story, but have no moral at the end. Just look at it.

Pawel Pawlikowski

What's been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what's transcendent.

Pawel Pawlikowski

My parents didn't take me to the theatre to see Chekhov when I was growing up - we went to see 'Francie and Josie' once every five years.

Peter Capaldi

I wanted to go to New York and be a stage actress, doing things like Chekhov. None of that happened, and then I went to L.A. and an agent said, 'I think you belong in commercials and TV.' So I did that and got some opportunities that I absolutely love.

Rachael Harris

I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.

Rick Perlstein

The interesting thing about Hain is that he's not a very interesting character. He's not fabulously clever. He's not a great policeman. He's not hugely charismatic. I'd describe him as a kind-of Chekhovian character. He's an ordinary bloke, to whom extraordinary things have happened. Which is quite hard to play, I have to say.

Robbie Coltrane

Christopher Knowles, Buechner, Heiner Mueller, Burroughs, Chekhov, Shakespeare - it's all one body of work.

Robert Wilson

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

Salman Rushdie

There's a play that Chekhov wrote called 'Uncle Vanya,' and I when I was in school, I played Sonya, and sometimes people ask me if there was ever a role I could play again, that's definitely the role I would play again: Sonya in 'Uncle Vanya.'

Samira Wiley

Chekhov would have been an excellent screenwriter. He is singularly good at dipping in and out of a group of people's lives, like Robert Altman did.

Stephen Karam

My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.

Stephen Karam

I'd like to play something classical. I'm in the Strindberg society, and we do readings of Strindberg plays. I'd love to do Nora in 'A Doll's House.' And Chekhov. I have been working back to back on what I call 'regular jobs,' so it's hard to do plays.

Teri Garr