I gave him a photocopy of who I was, without telling him…

“These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar…

— Gary Shteyngart

Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.

— Gary Shteyngart

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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Gary Shteyngart

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.…

— 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

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

— Gary Shteyngart

“The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.”

— 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

“We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we…

— 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…

— Gary Shteyngart

One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but…

— 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