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… — Gary Shteyngart Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition.” — Gary Shteyngart Copy Share
If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch. — Gary Shteyngart Copy Share
“The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.” — Gary Shteyngart Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
