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

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

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

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

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.

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.

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

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.