Best 119 quotes of Gary Shteyngart on MyQuotes

Gary Shteyngart

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    Gary Shteyngart

    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

    Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.

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    Gary Shteyngart

    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!

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

    Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    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.

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    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!

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

    freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

    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.

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    Gary Shteyngart

    ... 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?

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

    I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings - weaker than me, and I was already very weak - I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward.

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    Gary Shteyngart

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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 Im looking out the window, and my bed and couch have nice views of the New York skyline.

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    Gary Shteyngart

    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.

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    Gary Shteyngart

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

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    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.