Gary Shteyngart quote: "I 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."

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

In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, bu...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I read real books. On paper. You know, those printed books? I feel like this is the last thing I do ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who re...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I took an acting class with Louise Lasser, Woody Allen's first wife and co-star in many movies. ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
GARY SHTEYNGART

Without humor, I cannot go on and I doubt many of my readers would go on either. Humor is so importa...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both t...
GARY SHTEYNGART

If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
GARY SHTEYNGART

That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my mult...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pret...
GARY SHTEYNGART

A lot of the ways of advertising a book - the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them se...
GARY SHTEYNGART

In America, everyone writes but no one reads. Everyone's writing all day long - sending emails, ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
GARY SHTEYNGART

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We'...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I love Paul Giamatti - God, that man is like a walking Chekhov. His connection to humanity is unbeli...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person th...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I write almost entirely in bed or on a couch with my feet up on the coffee table. I feel most creati...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. There's never a n...
GARY SHTEYNGART

When civilization takes a nose dive, how can you look away? You've got to be there. You've g...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissiv...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I like the map feature on the iPhone that tells me where I am, because I travel a lot.
GARY SHTEYNGART

My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day mea...
GARY SHTEYNGART

This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vag...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I was very, very sick when I was growing up in Russia. The ambulance constantly came to our house. I...
GARY SHTEYNGART

You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time awa...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because ev...
GARY SHTEYNGART

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
GARY SHTEYNGART

I know this kind of girl,” Grace was saying. “It’s the worst kind of combination of abuse and ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor w...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Medio...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I remember reading the Times in the subway, folding it awkwardly while leaning against the door, cau...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Tutt'intorno a noi scorreva la città di Roma, splendida nella sua indifferenza, eternamente sicura ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I wish I were stronger and more secure in myself so that I could really spend my life with a guy lik...
GARY SHTEYNGART

That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attentio...
GARY SHTEYNGART

In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my fr...
GARY SHTEYNGART

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, an...
GARY SHTEYNGART

... I'm the fortieth-ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what! What if someday she lets me kiss...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You kn...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.
GARY SHTEYNGART

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf...
GARY SHTEYNGART

If we can't take care of each other now, when the world is going to shit, how are we ever going to m...
GARY SHTEYNGART

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

Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
GARY SHTEYNGART

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an o...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I'm not i...
GARY SHTEYNGART

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterl...
GARY SHTEYNGART

There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.
GARY SHTEYNGART

Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters ... Throw away your an...
GARY SHTEYNGART

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.
GARY SHTEYNGART

Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's impor...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of...
GARY SHTEYNGART

By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.
GARY SHTEYNGART

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

Maybe this is who I really am.

Not a loner, exactly.

But someone who can be al...
GARY SHTEYNGART

From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn’t returning to New York anytime soo...
GARY SHTEYNGART

There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. W...
GARY SHTEYNGART

People who think literature should be Serious—should serve as a blueprint for a rocket that will n...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The past is haunting us. In Queens, in Manhattan, it is shadowing us, punching us in the stomach. I ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true. The ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The reflexive sense of wonder, of crying over a medal of the Madonna del Granduca and not knowing wh...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.
GARY SHTEYNGART

stockbrokers, secretaries, government functionaries—everybody back then was expected to have some ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartm...
GARY SHTEYNGART

I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.
GARY SHTEYNGART

Just don’t write like a self -hating Jew,” my father is whispering into my ear.
GARY SHTEYNGART

In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is no...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it's been buffeted by her...
GARY SHTEYNGART

Let’s start with my surname: Shteyngart. A German name whose insane Sovietized spelling, eye-water...
GARY SHTEYNGART

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...
GARY SHTEYNGART

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

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

Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing no...
GARY SHTEYNGART

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

I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.
GARY SHTEYNGART

The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true. The ...
GARY SHTEYNGART

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebu...
GARY SHTEYNGART

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.
GARY SHTEYNGART

I am not good with others.
GARY SHTEYNGART

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
GARY SHTEYNGART

As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a da...
GARY SHTEYNGART

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favor...
GARY SHTEYNGART

One of the things that I'm really proud of is that I have really good timing. It's very easy...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

I influence anybody who is able to get through the chaos of my first impression.
GARY VAYNERCHUK

When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate ef...
GARY JENNINGS

I hope that people will see that we don't have to sit by the sidelines and watch as the two majo...
GARY JOHNSON

For some reason, Superman seems to be held to higher standards on the subject of secret/super identi...
GARY FRANK

Keep yourself motivated. You've got to be motivated, you've got to wake up every day and und...
GARY COHN

If there were no government-guaranteed student loans, college tuition would be much lower.
GARY JOHNSON

You can be the moon and still be jealous of the stars.
GARY ALLAN

Somebody said they threw their copy of Dungeons and Dragons into the fire, and it screamed. It's...
GARY GYGAX

Both the Winter and the Summer Solstices are expressions of love. They show us the opposition of lig...
GARY ZUKAV

When two people in an intimate-couple relationship look at their interactions as opportunities to le...
GARY ZUKAV

The more aware of your intentions and your experiences you become, the more you will be able to conn...
GARY ZUKAV

A spiritual partnership is between people who promise themselves to use all of their experiences to ...
GARY ZUKAV

The spring wakes us, nurtures us and revitalizes us. How often does your spring come? If you are a p...
GARY ZUKAV

There is no other way to change something or someone for the better except to occupy it first. The o...
GARY ZUKAV

We cannot control what emotions or circumstances we will experience next, but we can choose how we w...
GARY ZUKAV

The coming and going of the seasons give us more than the springtimes, summers, autumns, and winters...
GARY ZUKAV

The characteristics of an authentically empowered personality are humbleness, clarity, forgiveness a...
GARY ZUKAV

We cannot stop the winter or the summer from coming. We cannot stop the spring or the fall or make t...
GARY ZUKAV

The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for t...
GARY WEISS

Enhanced interrogation is not to be considered lightly, but the use of enhanced interrogation techni...
GARY BAUER

I just see religious freedom, as a category, as just being a black hole.
GARY JOHNSON

Particularly black Americans, many of them, from quotes that I have seen and conversations I've ...
GARY BAUER

People are fed up with the way things are. There is a lot of bitterness out there, a lot of anger ab...
GARY LINEKER

I went to Berlin to study psychology but decided that I was more interested in music and started an ...
GARY WRIGHT

By the law of averages, there has to be life elsewhere. The universe is so huge, and I don't thi...
GARY WRIGHT

I was the first artist, I think, to ever do an all-keyboard album. There were things that resembled ...
GARY WRIGHT

Artists were nurtured back in the '70s. Their music was developed by the record companies.
GARY WRIGHT

I didn't develop or build synths. I had my technicians modify them for my live stage performance...
GARY WRIGHT

I like Anastacia's version of Love is Alive best.
GARY WRIGHT

I will be developing artists for my new label. The rest is in God's Hands.
GARY WRIGHT

I'm developing artists for my new record label, my son's band, Intangible, being one of them...
GARY WRIGHT

In 1972, George Harrison invited me to accompany him on a trip to India.
GARY WRIGHT

My music and lyrics became an extension of this Indian philosophy.
GARY WRIGHT

The idea to do the album only on keyboards kind of happened by accident. I was quite happy with the ...
GARY WRIGHT

The more far-out artists, the better.
GARY WRIGHT

We visited Ravi. We didn't study with him, as such.
GARY WRIGHT

I scored a movie called 'Endangered Species'. I worked on another movie called 'Staying ...
GARY WRIGHT

Music is an extremely powerful force if used properly to uplift people. I believe music should be up...
GARY WRIGHT

No one likes to work for free. To copy an artist's work and download it free is stealing. It'...
GARY WRIGHT

Music's staying power is a function of how timeless the lyrics, song and production are.
GARY WRIGHT

Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessa...
GARY WOLF

Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical form inspires passion.
GARY WOLF

Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist f...
GARY WOLF

The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and u...
GARY WOLF

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it...
GARY WOLF

The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where fami...
GARY WOLF

Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam. Con artists prowl th...
GARY WOLF

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macin...
GARY WOLF

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic...
GARY WOLF

Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also m...
GARY WOLF

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field ...
GARY WOLF

Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to ...
GARY WOLF

The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it...
GARY WOLF

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware ...
GARY WOLF

If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends ...
GARY WOLF

During a large disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, warnings get hopelessly jumbled. The truth is that,...
GARY WOLF

Beefs against debt collectors are consistently among the top complaints received by both the FTC and...
GARY WEISS

Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies a...
GARY WEISS

Broadcasts from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have propelled once-obscure financial journ...
GARY WEISS

At their worst, message boards can subject you to mindless braying or outright stock scams. But at t...
GARY WEISS

When the Securities & Exchange Commission settled securities-fraud charges against Richard Harri...
GARY WEISS

George Soros is one of the few characters from the world of finance who deserves to be called larger...
GARY WEISS

India may be the only country in the world that has been free of anti-Semitic prejudice throughout i...
GARY WEISS

People are told their rights when they're arrested. Consumers getting collection letters are ent...
GARY WEISS

With such enormous bucks devoted to trading in oil and other commodities, the distortions that they ...
GARY WEISS

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regula...
GARY WEISS

Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased strivin...
GARY WEISS

I've met Dick Syron. I like the guy. He's a man's man kind of character, a real charmer,...
GARY WEISS

Indians are sometimes accused of being condescending toward Westerners and of being excessively prea...
GARY WEISS

The flip side of humiliation is pride.
GARY WEISS

Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiqu...
GARY WEISS

Some hedge fund managers have made big bucks trading oil futures - George Soros is one.
GARY WEISS

In the U.S., diversity is a politically correct slogan. In India, it is a historical fact. Much as w...
GARY WEISS

Excessive hype, bankruptcy, cash burning like autumn leaves - such is the stuff of short-selling.
GARY WEISS

One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intell...
GARY WEISS

You can't believe the government - on anything. And you especially can't believe them when t...
GARY WEBB

After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S....
GARY WEBB

Beaujolais is so underrated.
GARY VAYNERCHUK

Nobody walks this earth thinking he's better than I think I am - I think I'm great. At the s...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

Storytelling is the game. It's what we all do. It's why Nike is Nike, it's why Apple is ...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

The reason we love our parents is because they loved us first. Every single company should take this...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

The world has changed - through technology, through wine-making techniques, the quality of wine is g...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

It's insane to me to ask anybody to be what they're not. Know what you know the best, love t...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

I love people, and the hustle.
GARY VAYNERCHUK

When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes me remember why so many business fail. M...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers eve...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

Stop doing things that waste time. Don't replace time with your family or things that you need t...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

The chef that grew up with the grandma who cooks tends to always beat the chef that went to the culi...
GARY VAYNERCHUK

My dad passed on asthma to me. It's kind of ironic because he outgrew it at 13.
GARY VALENTINE

The key in controlling my asthma is pretty simple: I have a good professional diagnosis, and I follo...
GARY VALENTINE

Asthma doesn't affect me, even though I have it. It can seem like it wants to act up a little if...
GARY VALENTINE

I love everything about playing for Newcastle, the club, the fans and the city.
GARY SPEED

I have won 85 caps and have had a great career with Wales and have enjoyed every minute of it.
GARY SPEED

Everyone tells me to play as long as you can. Sometimes, it goes in one ear and out the other.
GARY SPEED

If I had my time again and was able to change one thing from my career then I wouldn't have reti...
GARY SPEED

A lot of people still disregard something like yoga. I would have as a young player. I would have be...
GARY SPEED

If you've got aspirations to be a manager or coach, obviously coaching your country would be a g...
GARY SPEED

You've got to believe you can get a result from the game.
GARY SPEED

I think it's unfair to criticise someone for not being Welsh, but the smaller the nation, the mo...
GARY SPEED

Everyone I know is fervently proud to be Welsh but you try not to be preachy about it. It's diff...
GARY SPEED

Goal scoring is a recurring theme. If you aren't scoring then you aren't going to win games....
GARY SPEED

I started a theater called Steppenwolf. We've been very supportive of the veterans there.
GARY SINISE

I'm not like one of those actors who's a frustrated director.
GARY SINISE

I save money when I'm working so that I never have to take a role simply to pay the bills.
GARY SINISE

But I've got more to learn, too. I don't feel like I'm done or I know it all.
GARY SINISE

If you're missing three or four limbs, you have special challenges going forward. And the last t...
GARY SINISE

I'm thrilled I can make a living doing something I enjoy.
GARY SINISE

I can honestly say that I've done everything I've wanted to do, always. Not without difficul...
GARY SINISE

The chance to play a romantic character who kisses somebody onscreen was one of the elements that ma...
GARY SINISE

I do spend a lot of weekends on the road. I have to pace myself. It can be pretty busy, but I'm ...
GARY SINISE

I 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.

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Gary Shteyngart

I 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

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