Top 100 Gary Shteyngart Quotes
#1. I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
Gary Shteyngart
#2. The best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. There's never a need to feel lost anymore.
Gary Shteyngart
#3. American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
Gary Shteyngart
#4. There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.
Gary Shteyngart
#5. I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
Gary Shteyngart
#6. My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.
Gary Shteyngart
#7. Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.
Gary Shteyngart
#8. I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I'm not in love with him.
Gary Shteyngart
#9. In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.
Gary Shteyngart
#10. I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
Gary Shteyngart
#11. I took an acting class with Louise Lasser, Woody Allen's first wife and co-star in many movies. I've done some other indie films, if you look on the YouTube. I love acting - it's great.
Gary Shteyngart
#12. I write almost entirely in bed or on a couch with my feet up on the coffee table. I feel most creative when I'm looking out the window, and my bed and couch have nice views of the New York skyline.
Gary Shteyngart
#13. Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it's just a codified system of anxieties.
Gary Shteyngart
#14. If we can't take care of each other now, when the world is going to shit, how are we ever going to make it?
Gary Shteyngart
#15. We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.
Gary Shteyngart
#16. Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.
Gary Shteyngart
#17. Stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries - everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life.
Gary Shteyngart
#18. It's just a passing thing,' Vishnu had told me about his girlfriend's beliefs. 'It's like their way of assimilating into the West. It's like a social club. One more generation, it'll be over.
Gary Shteyngart
#19. The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family.
Gary Shteyngart
#20. There's something outrageously simple about extending yourself toward a goal the way a plant seeks the sun's rays or a gopher the crunch of easy soil beneath his paws, and then getting exactly what you want, sunshine or some prized tuber.
Gary Shteyngart
#21. I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
Gary Shteyngart
#22. I prepared for my meal in the usual fashion: fork in my left hand; my dominant right clenched into a fist on my lap, ready to punch anyone who dared take away my food.
Gary Shteyngart
#23. I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.
Gary Shteyngart
#24. Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I'm saying is that not everybody should have children.
Gary Shteyngart
#25. Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.
Gary Shteyngart
#28. She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.
Gary Shteyngart
#29. This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I
Gary Shteyngart
#30. All love is socioeconomic. It's the gradients in status that make arousal possible.
Gary Shteyngart
#31. That's what I admire about youngish Italians, the slow dimunition of ambition, the recognition that the best is far behind them.
Gary Shteyngart
#32. Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck.
Gary Shteyngart
#33. I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.
Gary Shteyngart
#34. In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society.
Gary Shteyngart
#35. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.
Gary Shteyngart
#36. Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.
Gary Shteyngart
#37. Without humor, I cannot go on and I doubt many of my readers would go on either. Humor is so important. I am here to have fun here with my work.
Gary Shteyngart
#39. Cohen was on his knees taking a picture of a passing cloud, an unremarkable cirrus shaped as if it were sketched expressly for a meteorology textbook, its immortality assured only through the wild Polish luck of having passed the former concentration camp on the day of Cohen's visit.
Gary Shteyngart
#40. A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ]
Gary Shteyngart
#41. My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?
Gary Shteyngart
#42. If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.
Gary Shteyngart
#43. I like the map feature on the iPhone that tells me where I am, because I travel a lot.
Gary Shteyngart
#44. It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.
Gary Shteyngart
#45. The past is haunting us. In Queens, in Manhattan, it is shadowing us, punching us in the stomach. I am small, and my father is big. But the Past - it is the biggest.
Gary Shteyngart
#46. Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their
Gary Shteyngart
#47. With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students
Gary Shteyngart
#48. I have some memories of certain things that happened in high school when I was stoned out of my mind, but I talked with other people about them, and I trusted the aggregated memories.
Gary Shteyngart
#49. Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.
Gary Shteyngart
#50. The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons
it was systemic and it was complete.
Gary Shteyngart
#51. I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.
Gary Shteyngart
#52. That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.
Gary Shteyngart
#53. But what kind of profession is this, writer?" my mother would ask. "You want to be this?" I want to be this.
Gary Shteyngart
#54. If you're not fascinated by Korea yet, you damn well should be. The most innovative country on earth deserves a hilarious and poignant account on the order of Euny Hong's The Birth of Korean Cool. Her phat beats got Gangnam Style and then some.
Gary Shteyngart
#55. How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury.
Gary Shteyngart
#57. Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
Gary Shteyngart
#59. The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
Gary Shteyngart
#60. The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.
Gary Shteyngart
#61. Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
Gary Shteyngart
#62. Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
Gary Shteyngart
#63. How desperately I wanted to forsake these facts, to open a smelly old book or to go down on a pretty young girl instead. Why couldn't I have been born to a better world?
Gary Shteyngart
#64. People who think literature should be Serious - should serve as a blueprint for a rocket that will never take off - are malevolent at best, anti-Semitic at worst.
Gary Shteyngart
#65. She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.
Gary Shteyngart
#66. I read real books. On paper. You know, those printed books? I feel like this is the last thing I do to support my industry. I think they smell great, too.
Gary Shteyngart
#68. When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You've got to be there. You've got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.
Gary Shteyngart
#69. Maybe this is who I really am.
Not a loner, exactly.
But someone who can be alone.
Gary Shteyngart
#71. The physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself.
Gary Shteyngart
#72. As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn.
Gary Shteyngart
#73. He knows that people marked for greater things are often the least happy of all.
Gary Shteyngart
#74. Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it's not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.
Gary Shteyngart
#76. Russia tried to introduce beer as kind of the new vodka - and it's working with younger people in major cities - but you can have ten shots of vodka and be perfectly okay. If I had ten beers, I would be liquidated.
Gary Shteyngart
#77. He didn't love her. They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone.
Gary Shteyngart
#78. I told her my father was a retired janitor who liked to go fishing. She told me her father was a podiatrist who liked to punch his wife and two daughters in the face.
Gary Shteyngart
#79. My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.
Gary Shteyngart
#80. It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it.
Gary Shteyngart
#81. All of my books have an element of a man who is in love with somebody and needs them desperately, not just for procreation but for being able to fully unbosom himself. He only feels comfortable discussing things with women. Which is funny, because 80 percent of readers are women!
Gary Shteyngart
#82. The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true. The Soviet system worked best when its adults - its men, in particular - were welcomed to stay at the emotional level of not-particularly-advanced teenagers.
Gary Shteyngart
#83. These kinds of lost, overeducated mama's boys were perpetually stumbling down a corridor with two distant exits, one marked HESITANT INTELLECTUAL and the other SHYSTER.
Gary Shteyngart
#84. The true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it.
Gary Shteyngart
#85. Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
Gary Shteyngart
#86. Almost all had ill-grown mustaches and sported pinkish sun-bleached sandals meant for some nonexistent third gender, along with buzz haircuts that spoke of either nationalism or retardation.
Gary Shteyngart
#87. I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.
Gary Shteyngart
#88. I gave him a photocopy of who I was, without telling him that I was unhappy and humiliated and often, just like him, all alone.
Gary Shteyngart
#89. In America, everyone writes but no one reads. Everyone's writing all day long - sending emails, tweets, text messages; they all think they're James Cameron's Avatar, performing in some video game for which they make up the script.
Gary Shteyngart
#90. I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings - weaker than me, and I was already very weak - I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward.
Gary Shteyngart
#91. Heavy use of a special hypoallergenic organic air freshener is encouraged at Post-Human Services, because the scent of immortality is complex.
Gary Shteyngart
#92. If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead ... or a really effective oligarch.
Gary Shteyngart
#93. We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we're not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we'll go fucking nuclear on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips.
Gary Shteyngart
#94. My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
Gary Shteyngart
#95. After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.
Gary Shteyngart
#96. In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.
Gary Shteyngart
#97. 1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.
Gary Shteyngart
#98. That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.
Gary Shteyngart
#99. The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
Gary Shteyngart
#100. People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.
Gary Shteyngart
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