Quotes by Gary Shteyngart

Lets see if I can write about something other than my heart.

Theres no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. Were all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer -- in the 1860s he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you dont have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. (Gary Shteyngart: Finding Love In A Dismal Future, NPR interview, August 2, 2010)

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.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

Theres nothing wrong with her except shes completely fucked up.

Reading is difficult. People just arent meant to read anymore. Were 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.

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunices sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual living characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunices worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isnt that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

How can we read when people need our help? Its a luxury. A stupid luxury.

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.

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?

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 Im saying is that not everybody should have children.

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

As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesnt particularly give a damn.

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.

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 Im talking about, would be gone. And thats what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.

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 thats why they call it an education.

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.

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

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

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