{I'm partial to anyone who looks half blind) 
I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time. 
People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly. 
That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy. 
Remember this ... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important. 
Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer. 
The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted. 
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. 
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. 
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? 
You are not what you want. You are what wants you back. 
The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared. 
If only beauty could explain the world away. 
It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it. 
With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students 
American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it. 
I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity. ![Gary Shteyngart quotes: A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ]](http://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/gary-shteyngart-quotes-681645.jpg "Gary Shteyngart quotes: A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ]")
A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ] 
There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up. 
Good fucking Christ. What is this, an iPhone?" He 
America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards! 
Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it's just a codified system of anxieties. 
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. 
Any life ending in death is essentially pointless. 
I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated. 
The physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself. 
It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you. 
He didn't love her. They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone. 
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. 
Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their 
You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes. 
That's what I admire about youngish Italians, the slow dimunition of ambition, the recognition that the best is far behind them. 
The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief ( ... ) beautiful. 
The true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it. 
In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great. 
This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I 
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. 
That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system. 
My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me. 
We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense. 
Heavy use of a special hypoallergenic organic air freshener is encouraged at Post-Human Services, because the scent of immortality is complex. 
This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition. 
The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it's been buffeted by her endless sorrows and disappointments. 
The only way to write about right now is to write about the future. 
If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav. 