Chiunque voglia sinceramente la verità è sempre spaventosamente forte.

The Idiot. I have read it once, and find that I don’t remember the events of the book very well–or even all the principal characters. But mostly the ‘portrait of a truly beautiful person’ that...

Ascoltate, perchè non siamo tutti come fratelli gli uni per gli altri? Perchè anche la persona migliore nasconde sempre qualcosa all’altro e non gliene parla? Perchè non dire francamente, subito, quello che si ha nel...

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there...

Best Interpretive Dance” for my adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses into crunk. That’s cool and all, but you should see my Dostoevsky.

You’re not Dostoevsky,’ said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev. Well, who knows, who knows,’ he replied. ‘Dostoevsky’s dead,’ said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently. ‘I protest!’ Behemoth exclaimed hotly. ‘Dostoevsky...

I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy.

St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly – such hate! And...

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called “ordinary”...

If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.

But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who...

The Dream of a Queer Fellow I write the words again and they appear doubly pregnant with meaning. It is a true and terrible phrase : true, because we are all queer fellows dreaming ;...

So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy....

Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because...

Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth, but where is there any mirth in our time, and do people know how to be mirthful?… A man’s mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man,...

The digital age believes in the rational ordering of human beings. We believe that information will eventually solve every conceivable problem.

He longed to revenge himself on everyone for his own unseemliness

Information paints no picture, sings no song, and writes no poem.

Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.

We have an infinite supply of information and yet we cannot read.

The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for...

And it has always been a mystery, and I’ve marveled a thousand times at this ability of man (and, it seems, of the Russian man above all) to cherish the highest ideal in his soul...