Book: Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his family and friends
Quotes of Book: Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky
From an encounter in 1862..."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. book-quote