175 Quotes by Gary Shteyngart

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

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.

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

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

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.

Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it’s not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.

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.

It’s just a passing thing,′ Vishnu had told me about his girlfriend’s beliefs. ‘It’s like their way of assimilating into the West. It’s like a social club. One more generation, it’ll be over.

The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.