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Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it's just a codified system of anxieties. -- 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
I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity. -- Gary Shteyngart
The only way to write about right now is to write about the future. -- 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
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
We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we're not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we'll go fucking nuclear on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips. -- Gary Shteyngart
Whatever else could be said of Eunice Park, she was perfectly true. -- 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
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 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 true subject of science fiction is death, not life. It will all end. The totality of it. -- 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
I am not good with others. -- 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
That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy. -- 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
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
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. -- 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
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
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
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
You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes. -- Gary Shteyngart
I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist. -- 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
You don't want to end up in Troy," the -- 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
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
The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted ... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past. -- 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
Freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity. -- 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
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
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
Today I've made a major decision. I'm never going to die. -- 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! -- 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
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
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
The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared. -- 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
Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there. -- Gary Shteyngart
Any life ending in death is essentially pointless. -- 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
All love is socioeconomic. It's the gradients in status that make arousal possible. -- 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
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
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
Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their -- 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
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
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
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
My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me. -- 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
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
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
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 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
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
The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family. -- Gary Shteyngart
Stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries - everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life. -- 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
There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up. -- 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
There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction. -- 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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
These kinds of lost, overeducated mama's boys were perpetually stumbling down a corridor with two distant exits, one marked HESITANT INTELLECTUAL and the other SHYSTER. -- Gary Shteyngart
Good fucking Christ. What is this, an iPhone?" He -- 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
With a singlemindedness common only to former Soviet interior-ministry troops and first-year law students -- Gary Shteyngart
The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief ( ... ) beautiful. -- 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
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 like the map feature on the iPhone that tells me where I am, because I travel a lot. -- 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. -- Gary Shteyngart
Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide. -- Gary Shteyngart
I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens. -- Gary Shteyngart
By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent. -- Gary Shteyngart
I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live. -- Gary Shteyngart
A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [ ... ] -- Gary Shteyngart
{I'm partial to anyone who looks half blind) -- 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
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
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being. -- Gary Shteyngart
The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted. -- Gary Shteyngart
You are not what you want. You are what wants you back. -- Gary Shteyngart
Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart. -- Gary Shteyngart
How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury. -- 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
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 have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other. -- 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
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
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
In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great. -- Gary Shteyngart
We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense. -- 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
Remember this ... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important. -- Gary Shteyngart
Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way. -- 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
America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards! -- Gary Shteyngart
American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it. -- Gary Shteyngart
Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing. -- Gary Shteyngart
If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die. -- 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
I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time. -- Gary Shteyngart
This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I -- Gary Shteyngart
If only beauty could explain the world away. -- 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
Just don't write like a self -hating Jew, my father is whispering into my ear. -- 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
If they can make a fabulous gay man work like that, I thought, what can they do to the rest of us? -- Gary Shteyngart
I don't have many possessions, apart from my books. -- 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. -- 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
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
As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn. -- 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
It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it. -- 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
I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing. -- 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
Maybe this is who I really am.
Not a loner, exactly.
But someone who can be alone. -- 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
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
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
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
The physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself. -- Gary Shteyngart
I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated. -- Gary Shteyngart
If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead ... or a really effective oligarch. -- 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
Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie! -- Gary Shteyngart
My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me. -- Gary Shteyngart
He knows that people marked for greater things are often the least happy of all. -- 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
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