Shteyngart Quotes & Sayings

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

The true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it. — Gary Shteyngart

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

I gave him a photocopy of who I was, without telling him that I was unhappy and humiliated and often, just like him, all alone. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — 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 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

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

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

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

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

These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops."
"We don't want the United Nations" Mr. Nanabragov said. "We don't want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We're better tan that. We want America. — 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

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

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

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

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

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

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

My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me. — 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

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

I crammed a handful of Ativan into his mouth and flooded that orifice with forty ounces of Coca-Cola from the cup holder. 'This is going to take effect immediately,' I lied. 'Breathe, Mr. Sakha, breathe. Would you like me to sing a calming Western song? My name is Luka', I sang. 'I live on the second floor. — 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

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

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

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

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes. — 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

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

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

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. — Gary Shteyngart

I love Paul Giamatti - God, that man is like a walking Chekhov. His connection to humanity is unbelievable, and those feelings of low self-esteem - the way that all comes together on the screen? Delicious. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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 — Mary Karr

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

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

I am not good with others. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

Remember this ... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important. — 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 am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing. — 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

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. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

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

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

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece. — Gary Shteyngart

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

But what will happen, and I got this from reliable sources, is that the International Monetary Fund will skedaddle from D.C., possibly to Singapore or Beijing, and then they're going to make an IMF recovery plan for America, divide the country into concessions, and hand them over to the sovereign wealth funds. Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, all that jazz. — 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

Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way. — Gary Shteyngart

Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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

Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their — Gary Shteyngart

Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters ... Throw away your ancestors! ... Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath ... Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work
learn to choose. You are good enough, you are HUMAN ENOUGH, to choose! — Gary Shteyngart

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

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

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

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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. — Gary Shteyngart

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