Shteyngart's Quotes

#1. If Tao Lin had been born to Gary Shteyngart's parents and spent his early twenties slaving for pageviews at NewYorker, he would have written something like this, the Bright Lights, Big City of the click-here-now generation.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

#2. With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students

Gary Shteyngart

#3. 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

#4. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief ( ... ) beautiful.

Gary Shteyngart

#5. Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

Gary Shteyngart

#6. I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.

Gary Shteyngart

#7. Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their

Gary Shteyngart

#8. 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

#9. This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition.

Gary Shteyngart

#10. 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

#11. I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice - in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent.

Gary Shteyngart

#12. I like the map feature on the iPhone that tells me where I am, because I travel a lot.

Gary Shteyngart

#13. 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

#14. Vodka is a wonderful drink. You can drink so much of it without being as hung over as you would if you were drinking one of the brown liquors - the whiskeys and such. It's a great drink to go with appetizers.

Gary Shteyngart

#15. I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.

Gary Shteyngart

#16. By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.

Gary Shteyngart

#17. 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

#18. I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live.

Gary Shteyngart

#19. A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ]

Gary Shteyngart

#20. 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

#21. Today I've made a major decision. I'm never going to die.

Gary Shteyngart

#22. {I'm partial to anyone who looks half blind)

Gary Shteyngart

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.

Gary Shteyngart

#26. 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

#27. How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury.

Gary Shteyngart

#28. The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.

Gary Shteyngart

#29. That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.

Gary Shteyngart

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it.

Gary Shteyngart

#34. Dead is dead, we know where to file another person's extinction, but the artist purposely zoomed in on the living, or, to be more accurate, the forced-to-be-living and the soon-to-be-dead. Grainy

Gary Shteyngart

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.

Gary Shteyngart

#38. The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it's been buffeted by her endless sorrows and disappointments.

Gary Shteyngart

#39. I started to see it Eunice's way. We now had obligations to each other. Our families had failed us, and now we had to form an equally strong and enduring connection to each other. Any gap between us was a failure. Success would come when neither of us knew where one ended and the other began.

Gary Shteyngart

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. But what kind of profession is this, writer?" my mother would ask. "You want to be this?" I want to be this.

Gary Shteyngart

#43. That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.

Gary Shteyngart

#44. I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.

Gary Shteyngart

#45. If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

Gary Shteyngart

#46. The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction.

Gary Shteyngart

#47. In her bones, this may still be her country. But she will not touch it with her hands the way I do, trying to lyricize the filth and the decay.

Gary Shteyngart

#48. This is the superhumanity of the immigrant, but woe be to the all-too-human offspring living in the shadow of such strength.

Gary Shteyngart

#49. I was very, very sick when I was growing up in Russia. The ambulance constantly came to our house. I had horrible asthma that is easily treated in America, but they didn't even have inhalers back in Russia.

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. Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.

Gary Shteyngart

#52. 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

#53. Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.

Gary Shteyngart

#54. You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

Gary Shteyngart

#55. We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.

Gary Shteyngart

#56. 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

#57. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.

Gary Shteyngart

#58. Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it's just a codified system of anxieties.

Gary Shteyngart

#59. My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist.

Gary Shteyngart

#60. I am not good with others.

Gary Shteyngart

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.

Gary Shteyngart

#65. Stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries - everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life.

Gary Shteyngart

#66. Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.

Gary Shteyngart

#67. IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS VEHICLE ("THE OBJECT") UNTIL YOU ARE .5 MILES FROM THE SECURITY PERIMETER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF THE OBJECT AND IMPLIED CONSENT.

Gary Shteyngart

#68. America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards!

Gary Shteyngart

#69. My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.

Gary Shteyngart

#70. I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.

Gary Shteyngart

#71. There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.

Gary Shteyngart

#72. American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.

Gary Shteyngart

#73. Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

Gary Shteyngart

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I know this kind of girl," Grace was saying. "It's the worst kind of combination of abuse and privilege, and growing up in this, like, greenhorn southern-Californian Asian upper-middle-class ghetto, where everyone is so shallow and money-craven.

Gary Shteyngart

#77. 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

#78. A lot of the ways of advertising a book - the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore - those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.

Gary Shteyngart

#79. 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

#80. That's what I admire about youngish Italians, the slow dimunition of ambition, the recognition that the best is far behind them.

Gary Shteyngart

#81. All love is socioeconomic. It's the gradients in status that make arousal possible.

Gary Shteyngart

#82. I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.

Gary Shteyngart

#83. The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted ... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

Gary Shteyngart

#84. This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I

Gary Shteyngart

#85. 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

#86. If only beauty could explain the world away.

Gary Shteyngart

#87. That in the face of smarter women it was best to beat a continuous retreat, to slash and burn one's own personal convictions before their sure-footed advance.

Gary Shteyngart

#88. If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

Gary Shteyngart

#89. 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

#90. I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.

Gary Shteyngart

#91. Cereal is food, sort of. It tastes grainy, easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness. It tastes the way America feels.

Gary Shteyngart

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. Just don't write like a self -hating Jew, my father is whispering into my ear.

Gary Shteyngart

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family.

Gary Shteyngart

#99. 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

#100. Remember this ... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.

Gary Shteyngart