Quote

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

Gary Shteyngart

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Worse
Swans
Playing
Lake
Sure
Appeared
Much
Station
Things
Lakes
Stations
Sign
Tchaikovsky
Radio
Swan

More quotes by Gary Shteyngart

Image
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
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
Image
I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
One of the goals of analysis is you become your own analyst. You continue the process even if you're not in therapy, whether you continue the process by walking down the street thinking about things or whether you continue the process, as I do, by writing about them.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings - weaker than me, and I was already very weak - I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
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
Image
I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
I was really not a good student, and I felt that shame every day. That's one of the reasons I started smoking pot and drinking daily.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
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
Image
She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
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
Image
If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
In 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
Image
The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.
Gary Shteyngart
Image
If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
Gary Shteyngart