Home > Topic > Leo Tolstoy
1 " There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer -- in the 1860's he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don't have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. (" Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future" , NPR interview, August 2, 2010) "
2 " 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 , Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
3 " 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 Dostoevsky , The Brothers Karamazov
4 " I get the same buzz cleaning up the yard as Leo Tolstoy did from scything hay. "
― Sergei Lukyanenko , Twilight Watch (Watch #3)
