Top 100 Quotes About Dostoyevsky
#1. I'll serve something black. Bean soup, licorice, coffee. It'll be very grim, I promise. We'll cover the mirrors. We'll listen to Piaf. We'll read passages from Dostoyevsky.
Stephanie Kallos
#2. It is regrettable that a Dostoyevsky did not live near this most interesting of all decadents (Jesus Christ) - I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#4. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#5. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
Jean Rhys
#6. I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.
William P. Young
#7. Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with
Christ on his mind
Charles Bukowski
#8. For God's sake, even her parents no longer read Dostoyevsky--haven't they suffered enough, they would say; after thirty years of communism, didn't they DESERVE Danielle Steele?
Irina Reyn
#9. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.
Christopher Hitchens
#10. As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
Dennis Potter
#11. I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.
Lynne Tillman
#12. For as Dostoyevsky warned, "No nation on earth, no society with a certain measure of stability, has been developed to order, on the lines of a program imported from abroad.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
#13. FYODOR MIKHAYLOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of a physician's seven children. When
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#14. Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature ... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Edwin Muir
#15. 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.
Anthony Marra
#16. Reading Dostoyevsky is like sitting in the front row of a theater, where the actors' spit lands on your face.
Charles Baxter
#17. But gentlemen, what sort of free choice will there be when it comes down to tables and arithmetic, when all that's left is two times two makes four? Two times two makes four even without my will. Is that what you call free choice?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#18. I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
Andrea Bocelli
#19. There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life ... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut
#20. Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. A young man sits in one.
Bruce Robinson
#21. Novalis and Dostoyevsky, awaited me just as do the mother, or the wife, the children, maids, dogs and cats in the case of more sensible people.
Hermann Hesse
#22. Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.
Dustin Hoffman
#23. I was raised in a household where I read Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and Kant, and I was never taught that my mind was feminine. I'm aware that my body is.
Jewel
#24. In those long and sleepless nights when I'm unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky's The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.
Twyla Tharp
#25. I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
Norman MacCaig
#26. White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
Ntozake Shange
#27. I like reading ... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
Andrea Bocelli
#28. Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.
Bob Dylan
#29. I first read Dostoyevsky when I was 14 years old and was entranced. Dostoyevsky truly is a writer for 14-year-olds, and I mean that in the most approving way - approving of his energy, and rage, his endless pessimism, and endless innocence.
Joshua Cohen
#30. If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
William Faulkner
#31. I identify with my culture, but I am happy to be living on a tolerant, intellectual island where I can deal with Dostoyevsky and Sartre, both great influences for me.
Orhan Pamuk
#32. Making eye contact during rough sex is roughly the equivalent of trying to read Dostoyevsky on a rollercoaster.
Jenna Jameson
#33. A new philosophy, a way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort." Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Rien Dijkstra
#34. Your eyes flashed fire into my soul. I immediately read the words of Dostoyevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, I FANCY YOU!
Eddie Izzard
#35. Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius
Dostoyevsky perhaps.
Larry McMurtry
#36. ...thinking about laughing with 2 yr old Findlay today - Dostoyevsky was right, "The soul is healed by being with children." ...
John Geddes
#37. I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare ... Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.
Francoise Sagan
#38. You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.
James Baldwin
#39. I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. My God, I'd love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, 'Well done, you god-damn genius.'
Mel Brooks
#41. In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.
Rachel Kushner
#42. The novelistic attribute of my work is very much like the Russian way of creating novels. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky - their work has so many gaps. But for the reader, you cannot erase those gaps because they are important. They contextualize the whole struggle. My cinema is like that.
Lav Diaz
#43. If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.
Uzo Aduba
#44. The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist. As Dostoyevsky said, All things are permitted.
William Lane Craig
#45. I'm sorry, Hen. I still have feelings for you. It's just that my band needs a real bass player now. We're not a joke band anymore. Okay, sweetie?'
That was how Petra Dostoyevsky fired me.
Daniel Ehrenhaft
#46. I was asked something about the economic problem of Communism. I answered, citing Dostoyevsky: The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.
Whittaker Chambers
#48. Dostoyevsky was her brother, Victorian children's books her passion and though she lived, when in funds, mainly on avocado pears, she took her bath each night with a different cookery book.
Eva Ibbotson
#49. I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up.
Richard Elman
#50. When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired.
Tadashi Shoji
#51. Are still men, and not keyboards of pianos over which the hands of Nature may play at their own sweet will. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld
Eugene H. Peterson
#52. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
Roy Blount Jr.
#53. I read 'the Hobbit' at the age when you're supposed to read it. I didn't read 'The Lord Of The Rings.' My father, who was an English teacher, advised me that once I had read 'the Hobbit,' that would be enough. I could then move on to Dostoyevsky.
Ken Stott
#54. I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
W. Somerset Maugham
#55. A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh grader, I think.
Cathleen Schine
#56. Siberia taught Dostoyevsky much that would be fictionalized in Demons, including criminal speech, the criminal mind and the ways of officialdom.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#57. I got on a Dostoyevsky kick right after college. I started with 'Crime and Punishment,' went on to 'The Possessed' and then 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot.'
Charlie Trotter
#58. A novel! Why do you say this won't liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!
Barbara Kingsolver
#59. Man is a pliant animal, a being who gets accustomed to anything. - FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Dan Ariely
#60. In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.
Elena Ferrante
#61. I don't really know what 'American' is. I know what Ukrainian is. We're happy Slavic people. We're not Dostoyevsky Slavic people. There's this sense of 'pick it up, get your hands dirty, make the best of it, celebrate.'
Nina Arianda
#62. One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.
Philip Yancey
#63. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich's, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#64. Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#65. It was like a dream in which one is being pursued, nearly caught and will be killed, and is rooted to the spot and cannot even move one's arms.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#66. Her gloves, as Razumihin noticed, were not merely shabby but had holes in them, and yet this evident poverty gave the two ladies an air of special dignity, which is always found in people who know how to wear poor clothes.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#67. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was 'sublime and beautiful,'the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#68. Thus a man will sometimes suffer half an hour of mortal fear with a robber, but once the knife is finally at his throat, even fear vanishes.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#69. And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#70. But somehow or other my intimacy with them was always strained and soon ended of itself. Once, indeed, I did have a friend. But I was
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#71. She was a diminutive, withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#72. Here, brother, contempt is no use, even if he does despise Grushenka. He may despise her, but he still can't tear himself away from her.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#73. , and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometimes be the means of saving us.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#74. If my arm trembles, it is because it has never been held by a pretty little hand like yours. I am a complete stranger to women; that is, I have never been used to them. You see, I am alone ... I don't even know how to talk to them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#75. I don't understand it either. Obscure and vague, but intelligent. 'Everybody writes like that now,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#76. [My] rheumatism has come in again"
Ivan, cynically, "The devil have rheumatism!"
"Why not, if I sometimes put on fleshly form? I put on fleshly form and I take the consequences. Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto."*
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#77. I worked it through with pride,I almost spoke without words, and i'm masterly at speaking without words.All my life I have spoken without words, and I have passed through whole tragedies on my own account without words
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#78. For though your mind is active enough, your heart is darkened with corruption, and without a pure heart there can be no full or genuine sensibility.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#79. Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#80. At home, I mainly used to read. I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me. And among external sensations the only one possible for me was reading. Reading was, of course, a great help. It stirred, delighted, and tormented me.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#82. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people's sins. Go, and do not be afraid.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#83. Oh, I wish so much to live again! Each minute, each instant of life should be blessedness for man ... they should, surely they should! It is man's own duty to arrange it so; it is his law
a hidden but surely existing one ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#84. But destiny will be accomplished, and the best man will hold his ground while the undeserving one will vanish into his back-alley for ever - his filthy back-alley, his beloved back-alley, where he is at home and where he will sink in filth and stench at his own free will with enjoyment.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#85. Yes, one day perhaps the leading intellects of Russia and of Europe will study the psychology of Russian crime, for the subject is worth it. But
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#86. With love everything is bought, everything is saved. If even I, a sinful man, just like you, was moved to tenderness and felt pity for you, how much more will God be. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can buy the whole world with it, and redeem not only your own but other people's sins.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#87. The queen who mended her stockings in prison must have looked every inch a queen and even more a queen than at sumptuous banquets and levees.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#88. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#90. Why does my action strike them as so horrible? Is it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the law ... and that's enough.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#91. Love the animals: God gave them the rudiments of thought and an untroubled joy.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#92. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#93. Don't be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don't be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#95. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#96. I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#97. But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#98. For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#100. People of the middle sort like us, thinking people that is, are always tongue-tied and awkward. What is the reason of it? Whether it is the lack of public interest, or whether it is we are so honest we don't want to deceive one another.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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