Gary Shteyngart Quotes
-
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.
→ -
Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.
→ -
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.
→ -
I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.
→ -
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.
→ -
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!
→ -
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
→ -
I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?
→ -
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.
→ -
Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.
→ -
We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.
→ -
I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.
→ -
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.
→ -
If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
→ -
One of the goals of analysis is you become your own analyst. You continue the process even if you're not in therapy, whether you continue the process by walking down the street thinking about things or whether you continue the process, as I do, by writing about them.
→ -
In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.
→ -
The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
→ -
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.
→ -
One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but they should also be fun. This stuff is fun! You shouldn't pick up a book and say, "Oh my god, I'm gonna better myself by reading this." You may better yourself by reading this, but who cares? Just have fun.
→ -
Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times.
→ -
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.
→ -
My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Zadie Smith Novelist -
Michael Almereyda Film director -
Jennifer Egan Novelist -
Jonathan Ames Author -
Chang-Rae Lee Novelist -
Jonathan Franzen Novelist -
Jonathan Safran Foer Writer -
Aleksandar Hemon Writer -
Karen Russell Novelist -
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Writer -
George Saunders Writer -
Simon Schama Art Historian -
Junot Diaz Writer -
David Bezmozgis Writer -
Colson Whitehead Novelist -
Jeffrey Eugenides Novelist -
Mary Karr Poet -
Phillip Lopate Film critic -
Sam Lipsyte Novelist -
Rivka Galchen Writer