Top 104 Quotes & Sayings by Gary Shteyngart

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

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.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.

The best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. There's never a need to feel lost anymore.

I took an acting class with Louise Lasser, Woody Allen's first wife and co-star in many movies. I've done some other indie films, if you look on the YouTube. I love acting - it's great.

I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.

If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.

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.

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.

When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You've got to be there. You've got to be at the bottom of the swimming pool taking notes.

In America, everyone writes but no one reads. Everyone's writing all day long - sending emails, tweets, text messages; they all think they're James Cameron's Avatar, performing in some video game for which they make up the script.

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

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

I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.

I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.

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.

I like the map feature on the iPhone that tells me where I am, because I travel a lot.

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.

I write almost entirely in bed or on a couch with my feet up on the coffee table. I feel most creative when I'm looking out the window, and my bed and couch have nice views of the New York skyline.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

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.

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.

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

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.

We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

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

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.

I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.

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

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

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!

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

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

The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.

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.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

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.

Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.