Gary Shteyngart Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Gary Shteyngart quote about:
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“Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.”
-- Gary Shteyngart -
“My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.”
-- Gary Shteyngart -
“If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.”
-- Gary Shteyngart -
“Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.”
-- Gary Shteyngart -
“Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 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 -
“I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.”
-- Gary Shteyngart -
“Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.”
-- 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 always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.”
-- 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 -
“The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.”
-- Gary Shteyngart
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