Vladimir Putin Quotes

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

I'm a reader. I like - I'm a great reader. I keep going back, though, to certain authors, just like I love film, but I keep going back to just five or six certain filmmakers. In literature I like Chekhov, for example; I think he's my favorite. And Flaubert - you know, that kind of concision. But I also like Tolstoy; I love those romances that, you know, weigh 500 pounds and take months and months and months to read.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

Jim Harrison is someone I always enjoy, one of the great contemporary writers. I like Tim Ferris' Big Boom Theory. I'm getting into a different kind of reading, not straight novels.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Contemporary fiction is the hardest for me because I am not really in the popular culture - I don't watch TV.

I love books; my suitcases are always full of them. Books and shoes. I read when I am sad, when I am happy, when I am nervous. My favourite British author is Jane Austen, and my favourite American one is John O'Hara.

I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.

I read Russian literature a lot.

I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.

I like Chekov a lot.

I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

I love Chris Crutcher, Sara Zarr, Lois Lowry, Elizabeth Scott, Madeleine L'Engle, Gordon Korman, Michelle Magorian, Heather Bouwman.

My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.

I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

I read very little contemporary anything.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

People who are readers of fiction aren't particularly interested in comic books.

I love 'Jane Eyre,' and I love the Bronte sisters. I actually didn't read any of them until I was in college, so I don't have quite the same connection with them that I think a lot of women do.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.