Home > Author > Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart QUOTES

Gary Shteyngart QUOTES

1 " Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Super Sad True Love Story

2 " 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 , Super Sad True Love Story

3 " Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being. "

― Gary Shteyngart

4 " There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Super Sad True Love Story

5 " 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 , Super Sad True Love Story

6 " How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Super Sad True Love Story

7 " I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

8 " My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers? "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

9 " Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I'm saying is that not everybody should have children. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

10 " I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

11 " As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

12 " The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past. "

― Gary Shteyngart

13 " My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Super Sad True Love Story

14 " The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

15 " She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

16 " I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

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

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

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

― Gary Shteyngart , Little Failure

19 " You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Super Sad True Love Story

20 " We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we're not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we'll go fucking nuclear on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips. "

― Gary Shteyngart , Super Sad True Love Story