For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.