Gary Shteyngart Quotes

One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but they should also be fun. This stuff is fun! You shouldn't pick up a book and say, "Oh my god, I'm gonna better myself by reading this." You may better yourself by reading this, but who cares? Just have fun.

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.

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.

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.

I was really not a good student, and I felt that shame every day. That's one of the reasons I started smoking pot and drinking daily.

Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.

It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.

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

One of the goals of analysis is you become your own analyst. You continue the process even if you're not in therapy, whether you continue the process by walking down the street thinking about things or whether you continue the process, as I do, by writing about them.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times.

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.

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

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

Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

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

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

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

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

People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.

If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

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.