Gary Shteyngart Quotes

How old are you? Twelve?" "Fourteen & three quarters." His eyes sparkled. "You're kind of little for fourteen and three quarters." "Am not," I replied indignantly. "I'm a sophomore this year. How old are you?" "Seventeen and two fifths." Hardy Cateses & Liberty Jones.

You have to realize that, about 20,000 years ago, there was a cataclysmic event when an entire rock face collapsed and sealed off the cave. It's a completely preserved time capsule. You've got tracks of cave bears that look like they were left yesterday, and you've got the footprint of a boy who was probably eight years old next to the footprint of a wolf.

Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

Critics and fans use the music of their youth as reference points. For years, people seriously wondered who "the next Beatles" were going to be, and classic rock bands were the de facto yardstick for rock quality.

I think it's important that all 50 years of rock 'n' roll live in the same place, because it's all connected.

I got turned on to rock music almost by mistake when I was seven years old.

I go on the bus, I walk. A friend left his car recently at my house and I took it out one day just for 15 minutes and it was terrible. You know why? I felt like I was back in LA again. Four or five years ago, when I had a car and I had been out of the city I wouldn't feel I was back until I got in the car, you know. But now I feel off the grid. I feel that I am not part of the culture. And because I don't have a car I don't really go anywhere to buy things. In fact, I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own.

It's a different story because guess what, the kid is only 28 years old, 28. He's not his dad, not his grandpa. He's 28 years old.

I'm not sure you can count as history, was Keith Richards's "Life," which he so modestly titled it. I did find it a fascinating book. Keith's a pretty honest fellow.

Jews don't camp...The last time the Jews went camping, they spent forty years wandering in the desert.

Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.

That's actually pretty tame, but the fact that it was coming from this unexpected adorable little 17-year-old, I thought I'd be getting a letter about her first rock show, but it's nothing like that - she gives me a tampon. It's a true testament to how the majority of our fan base - and I say this in the most respectful and best way I can - they're little freaks.

I'm going to say this tonight because 20 years from now, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, I might not be able to say it, but I can say it tonight….You are now watching the greatest living rock star on the planet.

For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile.

Gonzo . . . acidic hilarity . . . 'The Fun Parts' has fine moments, but it's not the whole Lipsyte story. Read it with 'The Ask' if you really want to know how a mordant jokester with a madman's imagination became a literary rock star.

Quinn Cummings is a master story-teller and her book is nothing short of delightful. Her insights into topics like celebrity, parenting, and cats with a taste for homicide are pithy and uproarious and not to be missed. Notes from the Underwire is charming, hilarious, and just snarky enough to be ultimately satisfying.

The best book of the year, Grobel's writing is quite marvelous. The Hustons reads vividly, just like one of John Huston's great films.

What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?

What you do for Jewish New Year is you go down to Times Square. It's a lot quieter than the regular New Year. It's just a few Jews walking around going, "sup?"

You kind of have to be like " What have you been working the last five years for? Why are you complaining?" It's essentially me talking myself out of being a crybaby indie rock butthead.

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

Being a female hard rocker and guitar player, I felt the need to put out a memoir. Almost like a rock 'n' roll women manual for women.

Being in a rock band for 20 years is not the best resume for anything else.