175 Quotes by 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.

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

We’re people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don’t know, we can sense.

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.

Let’s see if I can write about something other than my heart.

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.

He knows that people marked for greater things are often the least happy of all.

Joshie had 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 transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox.

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.