Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

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.

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.

'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 read Russian literature a lot.

The whole world recognizes Russia's cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

In Israel, the role of the writer is dictated by the language in which you write. Writers see themselves as cultural prophets.

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.'

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.

For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

I always really loved Russian literature, and I think Tolstoy's writing is full of a sense of melancholy and humanity, so it seems really modern.

I fell in love with 19th-century Russian plays.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them.

All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it's particularly sharp.

The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky.

By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'

England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.