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I'm never going to be Tolstoy.

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

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.

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 seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.

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

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

There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental; and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.

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

Going to Russia is going to be nothing for me. I'm going to treat it like it's the U.S. because, at the end of the day, it's one man, one ring.