Top 80 Gary Shteyngart Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.”

— Gary Shteyngart

52. “It’s just a passing thing,′ Vishnu had told me about his girlfriend’s beliefs. ‘It’s like their way of assimilating into the West. It’s like a social club. One more generation, it’ll be over.”

— Gary Shteyngart

53. “We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.”

— Gary Shteyngart

54. “The best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. Theres never a need to feel lost anymore.”

— Gary Shteyngart

55. “I was very, very sick when I was growing up in Russia. The ambulance constantly came to our house. I had horrible asthma that is easily treated in America, but they didn’t even have inhalers back in Russia.”

— Gary Shteyngart

56. “Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

58. “The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.”

— Gary Shteyngart

59. “Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.”

— Gary Shteyngart

60. “I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.”

— Gary Shteyngart

61. “People always write on my Facebook that they’ve seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.”

— Gary Shteyngart

62. “American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.”

— Gary Shteyngart

63. “My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.”

— Gary Shteyngart

64. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

65. “I read real books. On paper. You know, those printed books? I feel like this is the last thing I do to support my industry. I think they smell great, too.”

— Gary Shteyngart

66. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

67. “I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn’t want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.”

— Gary Shteyngart

68. “Folks had draped strange flags over their iron porticoes with drawings of pineapples and the word WELCOME. The South was like that, festive but impenetrable.”

— Gary Shteyngart

69. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

70. “I write almost entirely in bed or on a couch with my feet up on the coffee table. I feel most creative when Im looking out the window, and my bed and couch have nice views of the New York skyline.”

— Gary Shteyngart

71. “Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

73. “I don’t have many possessions, apart from my books.”

— Gary Shteyngart

74. “All of my books have an element of a man who is in love with somebody and needs them desperately, not just for procreation but for being able to fully unbosom himself. He only feels comfortable discussing things with women. Which is funny, because 80 percent of readers are women!”

— Gary Shteyngart

75. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

76. “Now he understood why he hated Luis Goodman and other writers so much. He was a damaged person, but not damaged enough to make a life out of it.”

— Gary Shteyngart

77. “Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck.”

— Gary Shteyngart

78. “That’s what I always liked about science fiction – you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.”

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

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

— Gary Shteyngart

81. “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.”

— Gary Shteyngart

82. “Rumination is the coin of my realm. Interiority breeds interiority.”

— Gary Shteyngart

83. “Because rich people were excused from the suffering of the world, they had to invent their own more elaborate and personalized forms of suffering and then to inflict baroque versions of that stunted inferiority onto others.”

— Gary Shteyngart

84. “In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society.”

— Gary Shteyngart