Gary Shteyngart Quotes

I Am Born Hungry. Ravenous. I Want To Eat The World, And I Can Never Be Satiated.

Let's See If I Can Write About Something Other Than My Heart.

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.

Silence Has Been Destroyed, But Also The Idea That It's Important To Learn How Another Person Thinks, To Enter The Mind Of Another Person. The Whole Idea Of Empathy Is Gone. We Are Now Part Of This Giant Machine Where Every Second We Have To Take Out A Device And Contribute Our Thoughts And Opinions.

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.

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.

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.

In The First Few Pages, Kundera Discusses Several Abstract Historical Figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's Sake, I Wanted Him To Get To The Plot, To Introduce Actual "living" Characters - I Recalled This Was A Love Story - And To Leave The World Of Ideas Behind. Here We Were, Two People Lying In Bed, Eunice's Worried Head Propped On My Collarbone, And I Wanted Us To Feel Something In Common. I Wanted This Complex Language, This Surge Of Intellect, To Be Processed Into Love. Isn't That How They Used To Do It A Century Ago, People Reading Poetry To One Another?

A Writer Or Any Suffering Artist-to-be Is Just An Instrument Too Finely Set To The Human Condition [...]

My Mother Cranes Her Neck. Her Ability To Be Fascinated By Things Is Her Best Gift To Me.

Vodka Has A Huge History In Russia, In That It's Almost Like A Currency. It's The One Thing That Keeps The Country In The Dark Ages And Having A Rollicking Good Time.

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.