Gary Shteyngart Quotes

No art is possible without a dance with death.

Since I was a child, death is definitely something that I think about every day. But I think that everybody does. You try and avoid it, but it's such a big thing that you can't.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.

And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

Without a function, we cease to be. So, I will write till I die.

The difference between art about death and actual death is that one's a celebration and the other's a dull fact.

I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.

But with writers, there's nothing wrong with melancholy. It's an important color in writing.

I am not afraid to die. I simply do not want to.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

I don't want to die.

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

The last to be overcome is death, and the knowledge of life is the knowledge of death.

It is not dying, but living, that is a preparation for Death.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun.

Oh Death where is thy sting! It has none. But life has.

I think we should look forward to death more than we do. Of course everybody hates to go to bed or miss anything, but dying is really the only chance we'll get to rest.

My feelings about my mortality are less selfish than they used to be. I used to affect a cavalier attitude to death; now I see it from my son's perspective.

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

Dying is a tough way to make a living.