Quotes About Dostoievsky

Some artists attain to the cosmos of the spirit only by a practice of violence. They are artists who know hell and speak of it familiarly: Dante, Dostoievsky, Blake, Rimbaud, Henry Miler and Jim Morrison. The vocabulary used by these men opens up their passage through the flames. This is the violence of the spirit (not that of passion) in which the artist becomes the accuser of a wayward society.

To me without Dostoievsky's work there would be a deep, black hole in world literature. The loss of Shakespeare, who must seem like a wild man to the Chinese, would not be as great as losing Dostoievsky.