A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.
Fyodor DostoevskyYou are a man still young, so to say, in your first youth and so put intellect above everything.
Fyodor DostoevskyThe whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.
Fyodor DostoevskyAs for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.
Fyodor DostoevskyAt such times I felt something was drawing me away, and I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where the sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours.
Fyodor Dostoevsky