Critics Quote by Lisa Kleypas

I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of…

— Ayn Rand

Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It's like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn't even go through…

— Mel Brooks

“If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

— Isaac Babel

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

— Elif Batuman

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

— A. N. Wilson

“...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

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works…

— Paul Auster

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…

— Malcolm Gladwell

“Epilogues are for Tolstoy”

— E.M. Forster

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…

— Tuppence Middleton

“The hero of my tale,” Tolstoy wrote when he was just twenty-seven, “whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I…

— Leo Tolstoy

“Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or…

— Isaiah Berlin