45 Quotes by Keith Gessen

You had to be fundamentally stupid, I sometimes thought, to become the sort of academic specialist that hiring committees liked. You had to be thick somehow. You had to block out all the other things in the world to focus on one narrow, particular thing.

Our grandmother lived in the center of Moscow. The rents there were almost as high as Manhattan's. On my PMOOC salary I would be able to rent approximately an armchair.

Honestly,” he says, “I judge writers on how they write queries. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer.” And if not, then not.

I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing.

One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.

The sanatorium itself was charming, a group of cabins in the woods, a place for overworked urbanites to feel pleasantly melancholic. A slackertorium.

To cook and clean yourself is intolerable. But to have someone else do it is exhausting.

In 1959, Moscow gave space to an exhibition of American consumer goods, and my father, also a member of this generation, tasted Pepsi for the first time.

The sudden collapse of the monarchy that had ruled Russia for three hundred years led to chaos. Russia immediately became, as one participant put it, 'the freest country in the world.'