88+ Gary Shteyngart Quotes On Education, Atlantic And Humorous

Gary Shteyngart is an American writer of Russian-Jewish descent. He is best known for his novels The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story. His work often focuses on themes of immigration, identity, and the Russian-American experience. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Gary Shteyngart on love, life, education.

Top 10 Gary Shteyngart Quotes

1. The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.
2. The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
3. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.
4. Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
5. 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.
6. You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.
7. I write almost entirely in bed or on a couch with my feet up on the coffee table. I feel most creative when Im looking out the window, and my bed and couch have nice views of the New York skyline.
8. My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist.
9. freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
10. Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

Gary Shteyngart Short Quotes

• I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.
• Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.
• Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.
• I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
• The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
• Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
• I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.
• You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
• I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.
• If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

Gary Shteyngart Quotes About Love

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. — Gary Shteyngart

All of my books have an element of a man who is in love with somebody and needs them desperately, not just for procreation but for being able to fully unbosom himself. He only feels comfortable discussing things with women. Which is funny, because 80 percent of readers are women! — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

The memoirs I love are all very intense. If you're going to do a memoir and protect yourself, what the hell's the point? Just do fiction. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

I love to act, I've always wanted to be an actor. I think that acting and fiction go nicely together - being able to visualize language as something you perform, not just something that's there on the page. — Gary Shteyngart

I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love? — Gary Shteyngart

I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I'm not in love with him. — Gary Shteyngart

It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you. — Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart Quotes About Life

Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck. — Gary Shteyngart

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult. — Gary Shteyngart

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die. — Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart Famous Quotes And Sayings

You can't have a Russian household without vodka. It's just something to wash everything down with. I can't remember a time when I didn't drink vodka, either in Russia or here. I don't think there's ever a wrong time to start drinking it. My ancestors drank it, and if I ever have any children, they'll be drinking it. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality. — 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. 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. — Gary Shteyngart

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards! — Gary Shteyngart

My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me. — Gary Shteyngart

That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system. — Gary Shteyngart

I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore. — Gary Shteyngart

By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent. — Gary Shteyngart

We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions. — 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 misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything. — Gary Shteyngart

Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors. — Gary Shteyngart

I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth. — Gary Shteyngart

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! — 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 industry. I think they smell great, too. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

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

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. — 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 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. — Gary Shteyngart

I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice - in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer. — Gary Shteyngart

My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me. — 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 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. — 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

The best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. Theres never a need to feel lost anymore. — Gary Shteyngart

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav. — Gary Shteyngart

You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time away from the constant need to communicate and to connect. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time. — Gary Shteyngart

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it. — Gary Shteyngart

We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense. — 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 pot and drinking daily. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy. — Gary Shteyngart

I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings - weaker than me, and I was already very weak - I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward. — Gary Shteyngart

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...] — Gary Shteyngart

People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly. — Gary Shteyngart

Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing. — 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 can have ten shots of vodka and be perfectly okay. If I had ten beers, I would be liquidated. — Gary Shteyngart

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being. — Gary Shteyngart

Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important. — Gary Shteyngart

Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more. — Gary Shteyngart

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

Summer is a Latvian chicken. We make foolish choices. We think we’re young again. We run with outstretched arms toward an object of love and it pecks us and pecks us until we’re standing there snot-nosed and teary in the middle of Astor Place and the sun sets fire to our Penguin shirts and all that is left to do is go to our air-conditioned homes and ponder the cruelty of our finest season. — Gary Shteyngart

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. — Gary Shteyngart

Life Lessons by Gary Shteyngart

1. Gary Shteyngart's work teaches us the importance of embracing our unique perspectives and experiences, and using them to create meaningful art.
2. He also emphasizes the power of humor and self-deprecation to make difficult topics more accessible and relatable.
3. Finally, Shteyngart's work shows us that even in the face of adversity, it is possible to find joy and hope in the world.