"What an artist and what a psychologist! It seems to me there are some passages worthy of Shakespeare. I found myself crying out in admiration while reading." 

--Gustave Flaubert on Tolstoy

"The pure narrative power of his work is unequalled. Seldom did art work so much like nature; its immediate, natural power is only another manifestation of nature itself; and to read him again, to be played upon by the animal keenness of this eye, the sheer power of this creative attack, the entirely clear and true greatness, unclouded by any mysticism, of this epic, is to find one's way home, safe from every danger of affectation and morbid trifling; home to originality and health, to everything within us that is fundamental and sane."

--Thomas Mann, on War and Peace