Gary Shteyngart Love Quotations

I love things on the decline because that's really the natural progression of our lives. We're born, we're feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins.

I'd love to have a 19th Century Russian book club where all the members had to act like the pretentious minor noblemen they were reading about.

I took an acting class with Louise Lasser, Woody Allen's first wife and co-star in many movies. I've done some other indie films, if you look on the YouTube. I love acting - it's great.

I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth.

... I'm the fortieth-ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what! What if someday she lets me kiss each one of her freckles again? She has like a million. But every one of them means something to me. Isn't this how people used to fall in love? I know we're living in Rubenstein's America, like you keep saying. But doesn't that just make us even more responsible for each other's fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said no to all this. To this bar. To this FACing. The two of us. What if we just went home and read books to each other?

It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?