Books Quote by Stephen Spender

“No. We never have read a line of Tolstoy. We studiously avoid doing so.”

— Frederick Rolfe

“I reached over, opened it in the middle, and began reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.”

— Charles Bukowski

“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

“Epilogues are for Tolstoy”

— E.M. Forster

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

— Paolo Milani

“They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important…

— Lev Shestov

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

— Isaac Babel

“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

“Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed . . . Tolstoy,” he”

— Brandt Legg

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

“Tolstoy’s interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from…

— Isaiah Berlin

“I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific…

— James Ellroy