Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems. Gary Shteyngart More Quotes by Gary Shteyngart More Quotes From Gary Shteyngart You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes. Gary Shteyngart blue-eyes eye blue The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful. Gary Shteyngart fading light beautiful 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 rocks girl years 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 weakness book world Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends. Gary Shteyngart personality writing mean Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there. Gary Shteyngart michigan lucky names In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great. Gary Shteyngart distance america rooms We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense. Gary Shteyngart knows people The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best. Gary Shteyngart soul book thinking The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared. Gary Shteyngart tchaikovsky swans lakes 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 pals mediocrity matter 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 reading talking book Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character. Gary Shteyngart crazy writing running I don't have many possessions, apart from my books. Gary Shteyngart possession book If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch. Gary Shteyngart russia stills ifs 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 book way moving You can't have a Russian household without vodka. It's just something to wash everything down with. I can't remember a time when I didn't drink vodka, either in Russia or here. I don't think there's ever a wrong time to start drinking it. My ancestors drank it, and if I ever have any children, they'll be drinking it. Gary Shteyngart drinking children thinking On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times. Gary Shteyngart appreciate personality night 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 kissing gay party By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent. Gary Shteyngart existence reading messages