Gary Shteyngart

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

— Gary Shteyngart

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

— Gary Shteyngart

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

— Gary Shteyngart

I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.

— Gary Shteyngart

“...any life ending in death is essentially pointless.”

— Gary Shteyngart

Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

— Gary Shteyngart

Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.

— Gary Shteyngart

freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.

— Gary Shteyngart

“I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live.”

— Gary Shteyngart

I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

“If we can't take care of each other now, when the world is going to shit, how are we ever going to…

— Gary Shteyngart

“Were all men separated from their children and wives by an invisible ribbon of cluelessness?”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.

— Gary Shteyngart

I was really not a good student, and I felt that shame every day. That's one of the reasons I started smoking…

— Gary Shteyngart

The best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. There's never a need to…

— Gary Shteyngart

I love to act, I've always wanted to be an actor. I think that acting and fiction go nicely together - being…

— Gary Shteyngart

“This is the superhumanity of the immigrant, but woe be to the all-too-human offspring living in the shadow of such strength.”

— Gary Shteyngart

You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time away from the constant need…

— Gary Shteyngart

I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice -…

— Gary Shteyngart

I was very, very sick when I was growing up in Russia. The ambulance constantly came to our house. I had horrible…

— Gary Shteyngart

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then…

— Gary Shteyngart

“Cohen was on his knees taking a picture of a passing cloud, an unremarkable cirrus shaped as if it were sketched expressly…

— Gary Shteyngart

In America, everyone writes but no one reads. Everyone's writing all day long - sending emails, tweets, text messages; they all think…

— Gary Shteyngart

“I started to see it Eunice's way. We now had obligations to each other. Our families had failed us, and now we…

— Gary Shteyngart

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been…

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

“The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological…

— Gary Shteyngart

“But what will happen, and I got this from reliable sources, is that the International Monetary Fund will skedaddle from D.C., possibly…

— Gary Shteyngart

My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close…

— Gary Shteyngart

... I'm the fortieth-ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what! What if someday she lets me kiss each one…

— Gary Shteyngart

“Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as The Gentlemen Who Like To…

— Gary Shteyngart

“My poor Eunice looked so tired when she huffed off the bus with her many bags that I nearly tackled her in…

— Gary Shteyngart

“When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent…

— Gary Shteyngart

I wish I were stronger and more secure in myself so that I could really spend my life with a guy like…

— Gary Shteyngart

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get…

— Gary Shteyngart

“Let’s start with my surname: Shteyngart. A German name whose insane Sovietized spelling, eye-watering bunching of consonants (just one i between the…

— Gary Shteyngart