Gary Shteyngart Quotes

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

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.

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

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we're only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better then the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo's Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What is you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?

You can't have a Russian household without vodka. It's just something to wash everything down with. I can't remember a time when I didn't drink vodka, either in Russia or here. I don't think there's ever a wrong time to start drinking it. My ancestors drank it, and if I ever have any children, they'll be drinking it.

... I'm the fortieth-ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what! What if someday she lets me kiss each one of her freckles again? She has like a million. But every one of them means something to me. Isn't this how people used to fall in love? I know we're living in Rubenstein's America, like you keep saying. But doesn't that just make us even more responsible for each other's fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said no to all this. To this bar. To this FACing. The two of us. What if we just went home and read books to each other?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

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.

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.

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

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!

Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.

Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.

Vodka has a huge history in Russia, in that it's almost like a currency. It's the one thing that keeps the country in the dark ages and having a rollicking good time.

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.

She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.

Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.

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

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.

I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?

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

Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

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.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.

Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.

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.

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

I wish I were stronger and more secure in myself so that I could really spend my life with a guy like Lenny. Because he has a different kind of strength than Joshie. He has the strength of his sweet tuna arms. He has the strength of putting his nose in my hair and calling it home. He has the strength to cry when I go down on him. Who IS Lenny? Who DOES that? Who will ever open up to me like that again? No one. Because it's too dangerous. Lenny is a dangerous man. Joshie is more powerful, but Lenny is much more dangerous.

My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.

I write almost entirely in bed or on a couch with my feet up on the coffee table. I feel most creative when Im looking out the window, and my bed and couch have nice views of the New York skyline.

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

The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.

I love to act, I've always wanted to be an actor. I think that acting and fiction go nicely together - being able to visualize language as something you perform, not just something that's there on the page.

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

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best.

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.

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

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.

After you publish a book, you become a writer and you're supposed to take it very seriously. You're supposed to show up at your desk - although frankly, I don't have a desk, I write in bed - you're supposed to show up at your bed and produce work. I think it's a little bit like work. I like to have fun with it, do things like make silly book trailers. I don't want to take this too seriously.

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

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.