Fernando Pessoa, From The Book Of Disquiet

- Hanif Kureishi, from "The Buddha of Suburbia"

I love Dostoevsky. I just don’t love him, I’m a Dostoevsky’s girl, I’m whatever he would want me to be. When I say I love him I don’t mean I just love ‘love’ him but I relate to him in every way a person would relate to another person, I relate to the words he wrote and I even relate to the words others wrote about him. In reality I would just do anything in my power to relate to him, my whole personality and the way I turned out as a person is based on Fyodor Dostoevsky. SO IF YOU EVER SEE DOSTOEVSKY TELL HIM I LOVE HIM.

- Kazuo Ishiguro - The Paris Review Interview: The Art of Fiction.

“Dickens told me,” Dostoyevsky recalled in a letter written years later, “that all the good, simple people in his novels … are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love… . There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel, I try to live my life.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his family and friends

'I love humanity,' he said, 'but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.'

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

Dostoevsky is one of those writers who, after showing you your fragmental vileness and natural disfigurement, teach you why you need to learn to love yourself.

Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin