Quotes About Tolstoy

Affairs have been going on since Tolstoy.

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.

Tolstoy may not be showing that much of Russia at that time even. It's hard to tell. You tend to associate the quality of the period with what's lasted - what's still good. And that quality becomes the whole period.

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.

A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.

When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him.

I always really loved Russian literature, and I think Tolstoy's writing is full of a sense of melancholy and humanity, so it seems really modern.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.

The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.

In 'A Confession,' Tolstoy found meaning that he could hold on to, and he lived for another 30 years.

This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.

Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race.

Their attitude seemed to result from incomprehension rather than cruelty, but as Tolstoy would have said, what's the difference in the end?

When, as the researchers put it, "life's fragility is primed," people's goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It's perspective, not age, that matters most. Tolstoy

Nicholas Nabokov's first wife did all in her power to make the new arrivals comfortable, arranging for them to occupy the flat across the hall in her East Sixty-first Street brownstone until the Tolstoy Foundation located a summer sublet on upper Madison Avenue.

You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like "a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers," anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely. Tolstoy famously

Human love serves to love those dear to us but to love one's enemies we need divine love.