Gifted Quote by Mel Brooks

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

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

— Isaac Babel

Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly…

— Malcolm Muggeridge

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

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

— Elif Batuman

“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

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

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

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

— A. N. Wilson

I see this quality [real interest and joy] in the work of [Pavel] Chekhov, of course, and [Alexei] Tolstoy and really just about any…

— George Saunders

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…

— Susan Minot

“Every real reader must read Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: the whole of his/her life of reading will change its meaning.”

— Paolo Milani