Gary Shteyngart Quotes & Sayings

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

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back. — Gary Shteyngart

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

Maybe this is who I really am.
Not a loner, exactly.
But someone who can be alone. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

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

My poor Eunice looked so tired when she huffed off the bus with her many bags that I nearly tackled her in a rejuvenating embrace, but I was careful not to make a scene, waving my roses and champagne at the armed men to prove that I had enough Credit to afford Retail, and then kissed her passionately on one cheek (she smelled of flight and moisturizer), then on the straight, thin, oddly non-Asian nose, then the other cheek, then back to the nose, then once more the first cheek, following the curve of freckles backward and forward, marking her nose like a bridge to be crossed twice. The champagne bottle fell out of my hands, but, whatever futuristic garbage it was made of, it didn't break. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

Good fucking Christ. What is this, an iPhone?" He — Gary Shteyngart

My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me. — Gary Shteyngart

I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live. — Gary Shteyngart

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

He didn't love her. They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone. — Gary Shteyngart

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

The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie! — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer is a Latvian chicken. We make foolish choices. We think we're young again. We run with outstretched arms toward an object of love and it pecks us and pecks us until we're standing there snot-nosed and teary in the middle of Astor Place and the sun sets fire to our Penguin shirts and all that is left to do is go to our air-conditioned homes and ponder the cruelty of our finest season. — Gary Shteyngart

A dessert made out of a dozen matzohs, a gallon of cream and amaretto liqueur, and a tub of raspberries. What I believe my mother is aiming for is a mille-feuille, or, in Russian, a tort Napoleon. The result is a vaguely Passover-based departure from pastry reality. In deference to its point of origin, she likes to call it French. — Gary Shteyngart

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

This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I — Gary Shteyngart

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

A few hours later, lying on a mat during rest time, Vladimir embraced the tiny curled-up creature beside him, his first best buddy, just as Mother had promised. Maybe tomorrow they could go to the Piskaryovka mass grave together with their grandmothers and lay flowers for their dead. Maybe they would even be inducted into the Red Pioneers side by side. What good fortune that he and Lionya were so alike and that neither of them had siblings ... Now they would have each other! It was as if Mother had created someone just for him, as if she had guessed how lonely he had been in his sick bed with his stuffed giraffe, the months spinning away in twilight gloom until it was June again, time to go down to sunny Yalta to watch the Black Sea dolphins jump for joy. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

{I'm partial to anyone who looks half blind) — Gary Shteyngart

But in the last message I got right before they ambushed his ass he basically said, David, you are a dreamer and a disgrace and you'll never get your shit together, and I'll always fight everything you believe in, but I'll also never love anyone more than you, so if anything happens to me just keep going the way you are. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another? — Gary Shteyngart

Today I've made a major decision. I'm never going to die. — Gary Shteyngart

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

You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time away from the constant need to communicate and to connect. — Gary Shteyngart

You don't want to end up in Troy," the — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

The reflexive sense of wonder, of crying over a medal of the Madonna del Granduca and not knowing why, will be mostly replaced by survival and knowing perfectly well why. And survival will mean replacing the love of the beautiful with the love of what is funny, humor being the last resort of the besieged Jew, especially when he is placed among his own kind. — Gary Shteyngart

Stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries - everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life. — Gary Shteyngart

As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn. — Gary Shteyngart

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

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. "You're my sacred ones," I told the books. "No one but me still cares about you. But I'm going to keep you with me forever. And one day I'll make you important again." I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever else could be said of Eunice Park, she was perfectly true. — Gary Shteyngart

How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury. — Gary Shteyngart

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

He knows that people marked for greater things are often the least happy of all. — Gary Shteyngart

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? — Gary Shteyngart

I like the map feature on the iPhone that tells me where I am, because I travel a lot. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

If they can make a fabulous gay man work like that, I thought, what can they do to the rest of us? — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as The Gentlemen Who Like To Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythyms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with 'Ass-N-Titties' by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre — Gary Shteyngart

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

Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. "Why was I so scared of everything?" I ask my mother nearly forty years later.
"Because you were born a Jewish person," she says. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

My father sits at the head of a table before the carcass of an enormous American turkey. What he is ashamed of is the one act of decency I have yet encountered in all the tales of our family's past. A young boy with a dead father and a dead friend bends down before a country dog and feeds it his butter sandwich. And I know that sandwich. Because he has made it for me. Two slices of that dark, unbleached Russian bread, the kind that tastes of badly managed soil and a peasant's indifference to death. On top of it, the creamiest, deadliest of American butter, slathered in thick feta-like hunks. And on top of that cloves of garlic, the garlic that is to give me strength, that is to clear my lungs of asthmatic gunk, and make of me a real garlic-eating strong man. At a table in Leningrad, and a table in deepest Queens, New York, the ridiculous garlic crunches beneath our teeth as we sit across from each other, the garlic obliterating whatever else we have eaten, and making us one. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans. — Gary Shteyngart

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

A co-op woman, old, tired, Jewish, fake drops of jade spread across the little sacks of her bosom, looked up at the pending wind and said one word: "Blustery." Just one word, a word meaning no more than "a period of time characterized by strong winds," but it caught me unaware, it reminded me of how language was once used, its precision and simplicity, its capacity for recall. Not cold, not chilly, blustery ...
"It is blustery, ma'am," I said to the old co-op woman. "I can feel it in my bones." And she smiled at me with whatever facial muscles she still had in reserve. We were communicating with words. — Gary Shteyngart

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