02UndatedThere's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer -- in the 1860's he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don't have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. ("Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future", NPR interview, August 2, 2010)Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
03UndatedIn 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 / quote ↗
06UndatedReading 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 / quote ↗
07UndatedIn 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?Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
08UndatedHow can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
09UndatedI write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
10UndatedMy 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?Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
11UndatedEvery 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.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
12UndatedI wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
13UndatedAs every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
14UndatedThe novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
15UndatedMy hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
16UndatedThe truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
17UndatedShe folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
19UndatedIn America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
20UndatedI am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
22UndatedWe may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we're not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we'll go fucking nuclear on your yellow asses if you try to cash in your chips.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
23UndatedThe 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.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
24UndatedThe fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
