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I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot ‘pay out’ the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!

Leo Tolstoy's 17 "Rules of Life:" Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Brothel Visits Per Month. Many aspiring epic novelists surely wouldn’t mind writing like Leo Tolstoy.

Leo Tolstoy's 17 "Rules of Life:" Wake at 5am, Help the Poor, & Only Two Brothel Visits Per Month

But can you write like the writer you admire without living like the writer you admire? Biographies reveal plenty of facts about how the author of such immortal volumes as War and Peace and Anna Karenina passed his 82 years, none more telling than that even Leo Tolstoy struggled to live like Leo Tolstoy. “I must get used to the idea, once and for all, that I am an exceptional human being,” he wrote in 1853, at age 25, underscoring that “I have not met one man who is morally as good as I am, or ready to sacrifice everything for his ideal, as I am.”

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