175 Quotes by Gary Shteyngart

I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I’m not in love with him.

1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons – it was systemic and it was complete.

The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true. The Soviet system worked best when its adults – its men, in particular – were welcomed to stay at the emotional level of not-particularly-advanced teenagers.

This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad. I.

I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I’ve been perfecting one voice – in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent.

Reading is difficult. People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re 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.

I gave him a photocopy of who I was, without telling him that I was unhappy and humiliated and often, just like him, all alone.

As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn’t particularly give a damn.