Quotes from Gary Shteyngart

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

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.

stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries—everybody back then was expected to have some kind of inner life.

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.

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

But what will happen, and I got this from reliable sources, is that the International Monetary Fund will skedaddle from D.C., possibly to Singapore or Beijing, and then they're going to make an IMF recovery plan for America, divide the country into concessions, and hand them over to the sovereign wealth funds. Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, all that jazz.

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.

Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as The Gentlemen Who Like To Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythyms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with 'Ass-N-Titties' by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre

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.

For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for Jesus. Sorry that the miracles ascribed to him hadn't actually made a difference. Sorry that we were all alone in a universe where even our fathers would get us nailed to a tree if they were so inclined, or cut our throats if so commanded—see under Isaac, another unfortunate Jewish shmuck.

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.

I prepared for my meal in the usual fashion: fork in my left hand; my dominant right clenched into a fist on my lap, ready to punch anyone who dared take away my food.

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

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

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.

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

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

It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it.

That's what I admire about youngish Italians, the slow dimunition of ambition, the recognition that the best is far behind them.

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.

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.

The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family.

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.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished' * --Czeslaw Milosz. * And, I might add, if the family isn't finished, then the writer is.