quotes by Gary Shteyngart

"'If Pushkin were alive today, he'd be a rapper.' Alyosha-Bob said. 'That's right,' I said. 'He'd be MC Push.'"
— Gary Shteyngart

"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 (Absurdistan: A Novel)

"These kinds of lost, overeducated mama’s boys were perpetually stumbling down a corridor with two distant exits, one marked HESITANT INTELLECTUAL and the other SHYSTER."
— Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan: A Novel)

"Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties."
— Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan: A Novel)

"freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity."
— Gary Shteyngart

"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"
— Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan)

"It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you."
— Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan: A Novel)

"This would be the worst birthday of his life. Vladimir's best friend Baobab was down in Florida covering his rent, doing unspeakable things with unmentionable people. Mother, roused by the meager achievements of Vladimir's first quarter-century, was officially on the warpath. And, in possibly the worst development yet, 1993 was the Year of the Girlfriend. A downcast, heavyset American girlfriend whose bright orange hair was strewn across his Alphabet City hovel as if cadre of Angora rabbits had visited. A girlfriend whose sickly-sweet incense and musky perfume coated Vladimir's unwashed skin, perhaps to remind him of what he could expect on this, the night of his birthday: Sex. Every week, once a week, they had to have sex, as both he and this large pale woman, this Challah, perceived that without weekly sex their relationship would fold up according to some unspecified law of relationships."
— Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook)