Top 100 Quotes About Tolstoy
#1. I was a big TV kid.When I was a kid, I would go home at 3:00 and watch TV straight through to the end of Letterman at 1:30 in the morning.I was obsessed with comics.And I would watch Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno and study them as if it was Tolstoy.
Judd Apatow
#2. It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#3. [Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.
Paul Auster
#4. The simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. - Leo Tolstoy, 1897
Michael Lewis
#5. Let fear once get possession of the soul, and it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment.
Sebastopol by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
#6. 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
Gregory Benford
#7. 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
#8. But the Russian writers would be packed away in mothballs and stored in our basement. I would savor the idea of Dostoevsky's, Tolstoy's and Gorki's volumes molding in the dank cellar, wisps of camphor and odors of wet earth floating above them. I
Maya Angelou
#9. Love provides the person with the purpose of his life. Intellect shows him the means to achieve that purpose. Leo Tolstoy
Robin S. Sharma
#10. I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.
Mordecai Richler
#11. If Tolstoy were alive today and working at Panopticon Insurance, he'd say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity (70).
Paul Neilan
#12. 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
#13. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. ("Tomorrow")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#14. Let me give you a piece of advice: Leo Tolstoy is not the only human being on this planet. Yet all I ever hear you talking about is Leo Tolstoy ...
(tr Benjamin Sher)
Leo Tolstoy
#15. I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.
Malcolm Gladwell
#16. If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.
Isaac Babel
#17. John Dewey was right that "failure is instructive," then Tolstoy's life is, well, an instructional gold mine.
Leo Tolstoy
#18. 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
#19. The test of observance of Christ's teachings is our consciousness of our failure to attain an ideal perfection. The degree to which we draw near this perfection cannot be seen; all we can see is the extent of our deviation. LEO TOLSTOY The
Philip Yancey
#20. 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.
Anthony Marra
#21. What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
Tom Stoppard
#22. My first reading of Tolstoy affected me as a revelation from heaven, as the trumpet of the judgment. What he made me feel was notthe desire to imitate, but the conviction that imitation was futile.
Ellen Glasgow
#23. Why vampires? You write centuries-long family sagas - why not write historical epics without any hint of the supernatural?"
"Well, that would be boring, wouldn't it?"
"Yeah, God only knows what Tolstoy was thinking.
Carrie Vaughn
#24. I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.
Mona Simpson
#25. Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.
Stephen Spender
#26. Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times.
David Markson
#27. You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.
Tom Stoppard
#28. I went through a whole phase when I was younger of being obsessed with Tolstoy and Kafka and Camus, all those really, beautiful, dark depressing books.
Jessica Pare
#29. Tolstoy's so-called inconsistencies were a sign of his development and his passionate regard for truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. The women in my life have all been librarians, English teachers, or booksellers. If they couldn't speak pidgin Tolstoy, articulate Henry James, or give me directions to Usher and Ox, it was no go. I have always longed for education, and pillow talk's the best.
Ray Bradbury
#31. But every line we write breathes victory and challenge, the bad temper of a conqueror, underground explosions, howls. We are a volcano. We vomit forth black smoke.
The heavens open and out comes an imposing
Pile of garbage; it looks a lot like Leo Tolstoy
Velimir Khlebnikov
#32. No young woman wants to marry after reading Tolstoy
Lisa Kleypas
#33. Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Me and You
Brooke Bida
#34. I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
James Ellroy
#35. But in Old Rimrock, NJ, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and started to crow, "It doesn't get any better than this," they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.
Philip Roth
#36. Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
P.G. Wodehouse
#37. Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.
Bob Woodward
#38. Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything else that was white "mattered.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#39. There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War, and also Peace, which are both premium books.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#41. The proof of spiritual maturity, Tolstoy contended, is not how "pure" you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.
Philip Yancey
#43. If you want to be happy, be" -- Leo Tolstoy
"The hard part is knowing it's easy" -- Abraham Hicks
Ina Zajac
#44. I get the same buzz cleaning up the yard as Leo Tolstoy did from scything hay.
Sergei Lukyanenko
#45. Tolstoy's definition of art is the inverse of the truth; the task of art is to transform not perception into feeling, but feeling into perception.
Raphael Soyer
#46. A great writer is a great writer ... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
Phil Klay
#47. If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.
Sebastian Faulks
#48. Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.
Elena Ferrante
#49. It was genuinely eye-opening for me to read Tolstoy or Steinbeck or Colette for the first time and to feel as though they were speaking to me.
Diane Drake
#50. I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.
Simon Schama
#51. People who have never had a broken heart will never understand dead roses, Tolstoy, airport lounges, Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, neat brandy, the moon and drizzle.
Wendy Harmer
#53. But it rained all the time, fog covered the fields, and by then he was reading Tolstoy. There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. A Confession was a book like that.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#54. For Tolstoy ... anything that human beings do has its glory ... I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.
Mark Van Doren
#55. Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us? ...
John Geddes
#56. Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was ardently persuaded of Christ's divinity, but that divinity moved his soul and solicited his intelligence most forcefully through its human aspect.
George Steiner
#57. 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
#58. 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.
Karl Marlantes
#59. Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.
John Bayley
#60. 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.
Lisa Kleypas
#61. [Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms.
George Orwell
#62. 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
#63. An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#64. I am not a fatalist. I have just been reading War and Peace and Tolstoy is such a fatalist. I think people can make a difference ... I am an optimist who worries a lot.
Madeleine Albright
#65. Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.
Emma Goldman
#66. Any man's greatness is a tribute to the nobility of all mankind, so when we celebrate the genius of [Leo] Tolstoy, we say, "Look! One of our boys made it! Look what we're capable of!"
Mel Brooks
#67. It's Tolstoy, by the way," I say as I open the door.
He turns around. "What?"
Shut up, I tell myself. Shut up.
"The writer of Anna Karenina. Not Trotsky. Trotsky was a revolutionary who was stabbed with a
pickax in Mexico in 1940. But I can understand how the T thing could confuse you.
Melina Marchetta
#68. But it is Tolstoy's understanding of life that the fate of each man and woman is determined by forces beyond their control; these forces include the dictatorship of social demands.
Leo Tolstoy
#69. As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.
John Gardner
#70. I don't quite understand what Tolstoy's actual personal view of Anna is - whether he likes her or hates her, whether she's the heroine or the antiheroine.
Keira Knightley
#71. There was no solution," Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, "but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day - that is forget oneself.
John Irving
#72. Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat
planet Earth
could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama
soap opera with literary trimmings.
Edward Abbey
#73. Human consciousness at present is a sort of battlefield. And you know what Tolstoy tells us about battles in War and Peace. Nobody really knows what is going on during a battle ...
Saul Bellow
#74. You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.
George Bernard Shaw
#75. Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
Marcel Proust
#76. Relationships are really what interest me the most. And I think, in the end, they interest most people the most. Even when you read Tolstoy or something, basically they're about man and woman relationships.
Woody Allen
#77. In 1910, eighty-two-year-old Leo Tolstoy flees from his wife and dies in a railway station of exposure.
Jon Winokur
#78. 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
#79. Oh God. He's quoting Tolstoy and touching me. I'm done for.
Helena Hunting
#80. I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
Vladimir Putin
#83. Our world is hungry for genuinely changed people. Leo Tolstoy observes, "Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself."6
Richard J. Foster
#84. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#86. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#87. Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.
Robert Gottlieb
#88. I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.
Twyla Tharp
#89. Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
Gretchen Rubin
#90. 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
#91. Are we genuinely prepared to say that working in an office building or shopping in a mall is real, while reading Tolstoy is not?
Sarah Arthur
#92. What has appealed to me most in Tolstoy's life is that he practiced what he preached and reckoned no cost too great in his pursuit of truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
#93. Everyone thinks about changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. - Leo Tolstoy
Beth Kanter
#94. 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
Atul Gawande
#95. They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad. This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.
Lev Shestov
#96. Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
A. N. Wilson
#97. There are people who read Tolstoy or Dostoevski who do not insist that their endings be happy or pleasant or, at least, not be depressing. But if you're writing mysteries - oh, no, you can't have an ending like that. It must be tidy.
Martha Grimes
#98. Leo Tolstoy wrote: "One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."19
Jonathan Haidt
#99. I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
Ayn Rand
#100. I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.
Susan Minot
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