Gary Shteyngart Quotes

If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

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.

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

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.

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.

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.

We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

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

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.

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

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.

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.

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.

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

I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.

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.

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.

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

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.

Maybe this is who I really am.Not a loner, exactly.But someone who can be alone.

All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.

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.