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I got on a Dostoyevsky kick right after college. I started with 'Crime and Punishment,' went on to 'The Possessed' and then 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot.'

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.

'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.

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

As a teenager, my dad taught me about the idea of unintended consequences, and I've had the experience, and how to deal with it, pounded into my soul over the years.

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

I was a nut for Dostoevsky. You can tell a lot from what people read between those ages. My brother was a Steinbeck freak and now he lives in a little village in New Hampshire and he's a baker.

When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

My Father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.