Character Quote by Mel Brooks

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

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

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

— Isaac Babel

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

“I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation…

— Anton Chekhov

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

— A. N. Wilson

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'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way…

— Andrea Bocelli

I've always known that the best part of writing occurs before you've picked up a pen. When a story exists only in your mind,…

— Carolyn Parkhurst

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

— Elif Batuman

“Two kinds of writers. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe everything: the fall, the battle, the accouchement,…

— Susan Sontag

Hemingway, damn his soul, makes everything he writes terrifically exciting (and incidentally makes all us second-raters seem positively adolescent) by the seemingly simple expedient…

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings