Quotes by Gary Shteyngart

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

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

The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that dont work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

Maybe this is who I really am.Not a loner, exactly.But someone who can be alone.

All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.

These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You dont have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you dont have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe theyll send troops.We dont want the United Nations Mr. Nanabragov said. We dont want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. Were better tan that. We want America.

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.

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

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it wont matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We dont believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that were only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better then the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoos Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What is you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?

Without humor, I cannot go on and I doubt many of my readers would go on either. Humor is so important. I am here to have fun here with my work.

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.

“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)”