Top 162 Tolstoy Quotes & Sayings

I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.

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

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want.

To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.

I'm never going to be Tolstoy.

In 1910, eighty-two-year-old Leo Tolstoy flees from his wife and dies in a railway station of exposure.

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 are his novellas.

I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead.

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society.

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

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

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.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

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.

I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?

Everybody is a regionalist. Tolstoy is a regionalist - one is where one lives, where one writes.

Affairs have been going on since Tolstoy.

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

I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.

I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.

...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.

I think if I were reading to a grandchild, I might read Tolstoy's War and Peace. They would learn about Russia, they would learn about history, they would learn about human nature. They would learn about, "Can the individual make a difference or is it great forces?" Tolstoy is always battling with those large issues. Mostly, a whole world would come alive for them through that book.

I'm through with Tolstoy. He has ceased to exist for me.... If I eat a bowl of soup and like it, I know by that fact alone and with absolute certainty that Tolstoy will find it bad, and vice versa.

Leo Tolstoy ... defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers.

I was nothing more than a thug with Tolstoy in my pocket.

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

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.

Tolstoy was the greatest apostle of nonviolence that the present age has produced.

... good teachers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are alike everywhere.

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.

I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

In 'A Confession,' Tolstoy found meaning that he could hold on to, and he lived for another 30 years.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.

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.

A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.

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 I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

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.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.

Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.

As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.

I don't believe that my first name is Leo or that my last name is Tolstoy. I'm a storyteller.

I get the same buzz cleaning up the yard as Leo Tolstoy did from scything hay.

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.

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.

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

I started with [Leo] Tolstoy and I was overwhelmed. Tolstoy writes like an ocean, in huge, rolling waves, and it doesn't look like it was processed through his thinking. It feels very natural. You don't question whether Tolstoy's right or wrong. His philosophy is housed in interrelating characters, so it's not up for grabs.

It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch.

Tolstoy's so-called inconsistencies were a sign of his development and his passionate regard for truth.

I think Tolstoy had an unbelievably complicated relationship with women.

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.