Shteyngart Quotes
Collection of top 91 famous quotes about Shteyngart
Shteyngart Quotes & Sayings
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Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.
— Gary Shteyngart
I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.
— Gary Shteyngart
Freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
— Gary Shteyngart
Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.
— Gary Shteyngart
I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live.
— Gary Shteyngart
Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
— 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
But what kind of profession is this, writer?" my mother would ask. "You want to be this?" I want to be this.
— Gary Shteyngart
I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.
— 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
Stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries - everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life.
— 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 entering into the consciousness of another human being.
— 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
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
Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie!
— Gary Shteyngart
If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.
— 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
My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.
— 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
I am not good with others.
— 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
I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
— Gary Shteyngart
When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You've got to be there. You've got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.
— 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
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
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
As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn.
— Gary Shteyngart
You don't want to end up in Troy," the
— 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 like the map feature on the iPhone that tells me where I am, because I travel a lot.
— Gary Shteyngart
Whatever else could be said of Eunice Park, she was perfectly true.
— 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
Today I've made a major decision. I'm never going to die.
— Gary Shteyngart
All love is socioeconomic. It's the gradients in status that make arousal possible.
— Gary Shteyngart
I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.
— Gary Shteyngart
Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
— 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
Remember this ... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.
— Gary Shteyngart
In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.
— Gary Shteyngart
This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I
— Gary Shteyngart
The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.
— Gary Shteyngart
You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
— 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
That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.
— 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
My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
— 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
We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.
— Gary Shteyngart
{I'm partial to anyone who looks half blind)
— Gary Shteyngart
Heavy use of a special hypoallergenic organic air freshener is encouraged at Post-Human Services, because the scent of immortality is complex.
— Gary Shteyngart
This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition.
— 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
The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
— 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
American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
— Gary Shteyngart
I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
— Gary Shteyngart
A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ]
— Gary Shteyngart
It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it.
— Gary Shteyngart
There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.
— Gary Shteyngart
Good fucking Christ. What is this, an iPhone?" He
— Gary Shteyngart
If only beauty could explain the world away.
— Gary Shteyngart
America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards!
— Gary Shteyngart
Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it's just a codified system of anxieties.
— 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
Any life ending in death is essentially pointless.
— Gary Shteyngart
The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
— Gary Shteyngart
The true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it.
— Gary Shteyngart
The physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself.
— Gary Shteyngart
You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.
— 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
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 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.
— 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
Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their
— Gary Shteyngart
With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students
— 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
