Gary Shteyngart

“I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.”

“I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.”

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

“In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.”

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

“The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?”

“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.”

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

“There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.”

“My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?”

“In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.”

“Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.”

“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.”

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

“Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I'm saying is that not everybody should have children.”