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Leo Tolstoy Quotes

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.
- Edward Abbey

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.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Let me give you a piece of advice: Leo Tolstoy is not the only human being on this planet. Yet all I ever hear you talking about is Leo Tolstoy...
(tr Benjamin Sher)
- Leo Tolstoy

But in Old Rimrock, NJ, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and started to crow, "It doesn't get any better than this," they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was.
- Philip Roth

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