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"We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
"If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."
Explore more quotes by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship."
"It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half."
"Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it."
"A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about."
"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man."
"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."
"We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken."
"Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death."
"One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man."
"Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!"
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