Top 80 Gary Shteyngart Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everyone struggles. Each life comes with a long catalog of pain.”

— Gary Shteyngart

2. “I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.”

— Gary Shteyngart

3. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

4. “If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.”

— Gary Shteyngart

5. “Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide.”

— Gary Shteyngart

6. “I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.”

— Gary Shteyngart

7. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

8. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

9. “America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards!”

— Gary Shteyngart

10. “My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist.”

— Gary Shteyngart

11. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

13. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

14. “You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.”

— Gary Shteyngart

15. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

16. “It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.”

— Gary Shteyngart

17. “Being a full prof at the University of Texas at El Paso meant living like a managing director at Barclays. Barry had always wondered why people who were just upper-middle class in New York chose to stay there, given that they could live like minor dictators in the rest of the country. “You’re negative arbing yourself,” he used to say.”

— Gary Shteyngart

18. “Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.”

— Gary Shteyngart

19. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

20. “By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.”

— Gary Shteyngart

21. “You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.”

— Gary Shteyngart

22. “Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

24. “Summer is a Latvian chicken. We make foolish choices. We think we’re young again. We run with outstretched arms toward an object of love and it pecks us and pecks us until we’re standing there snot-nosed and teary in the middle of Astor Place and the sun sets fire to our Penguin shirts and all that is left to do is go to our air-conditioned homes and ponder the cruelty of our finest season.”

— Gary Shteyngart

25. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

26. “He didn’t love her. They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

28. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

29. “My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.”

— Gary Shteyngart

30. “I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.”

— Gary Shteyngart

31. “If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.”

— Gary Shteyngart

32. “I have some memories of certain things that happened in high school when I was stoned out of my mind, but I talked with other people about them, and I trusted the aggregated memories.”

— Gary Shteyngart

33. “Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.”

— Gary Shteyngart

34. “She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

36. “I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings – weaker than me, and I was already very weak – I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward.”

— Gary Shteyngart

37. “She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.”

— Gary Shteyngart

38. “That’s what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.”

— Gary Shteyngart

39. “Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.”

— Gary Shteyngart

40. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

41. “My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

43. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

44. “Soon you will be home and in my arms and the world will reconfigure itself around you and there will be enough compassion for you to feel scared by how much I care for you.”

— Gary Shteyngart

45. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

46. “If you’re not fascinated by Korea yet, you damn well should be. The most innovative country on earth deserves a hilarious and poignant account on the order of Euny Hong’s The Birth of Korean Cool. Her phat beats got Gangnam Style and then some.”

— Gary Shteyngart

47. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

48. “If my mother hadn’t tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would’ve been the lawyer she wanted me to be.”

— Gary Shteyngart

49. “I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart