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... 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?

-Gary Shteyngart

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... I'm The Fortieth-ugliest

Gary Shteyngart

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... 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?

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Topic

Falling In Love

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People Always Write On My Facebook That They've Seen Somebody They Thought Was Me On The Subway, And I Was Cursing Badly.

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!

America Should Treasure Its Rare, True Original Voices And Mark Leyner Is One Of Them. So Treasure Him Already, You Bastards!

The Fading Light Is Us, And We Are, For A Moment So Brief (...) Beautiful.

I Have A Great Memory. And Actually, I Remember Russia In Some Ways Better Than I Remember Queens.

Forget The Fountain Of Youth, Pal Of Mine. You Can Live To Be A Thousand, And It Won't Matter. Mediocrities Like You Deserve Immortality.

I Have My Own Dying Empire To Contend With, And I Do Not Wish For Any Other.

... 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?

Falling In Love

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.

I Love To Act, I've Always Wanted To Be An Actor. I Think That Acting And Fiction Go Nicely Together - Being Able To Visualize Language As Something You Perform, Not Just Something That's There On The Page.

Then I Celebrated My Wall Of Books. I Counted The Volumes On My Twenty-foot-long Modernist Bookshelf To Make Sure None Had Been Misplaced Or Used As Kindling By My Subtenant. “you’re My Sacred Ones,” I Told The Books. “no One But Me Still Cares About You. But I’m Going To Keep You With Me Forever. And One Day I’ll Make You Important Again.” I Thought About That Terrible Calumny Of The New Generation: That Books Smell.

That's What I Always Liked About Science Fiction - You Can Make The World End. Humour Is My Multiple Warhead Delivery System.

In America, The Distance Between Wanting Something And Having It Delivered To Your Living Room Is Not Terribly Great.

I Read Real Books. On Paper. You Know, Those Printed Books? I Feel Like This Is The Last Thing I Do To Support My Industry. I Think They Smell Great, Too.

The Radio Station Was Playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, A Sure Sign That Things Were Much Worse Than They Appeared.

Do Not Throw Away Your Heart. Keep Your Heart. Your Heart Is All That Matters ... Throw Away Your Ancestors! ... Throw Away Your Shyness And The Anger That Lies Just A Few Inches Beneath ... Accept The Truth! And If There Is More Than One Truth, Then Learn To Do The Difficult Work -- Learn To Choose. You Are Good Enough, You Are Human Enough, To Choose!

I Wish I Were Stronger And More Secure In Myself So That I Could Really Spend My Life With A Guy Like Lenny. Because He Has A Different Kind Of Strength Than Joshie. He Has The Strength Of His Sweet Tuna Arms. He Has The Strength Of Putting His Nose In My Hair And Calling It Home. He Has The Strength To Cry When I Go Down On Him. Who Is Lenny? Who Does That? Who Will Ever Open Up To Me Like That Again? No One. Because It's Too Dangerous. Lenny Is A Dangerous Man. Joshie Is More Powerful, But Lenny Is Much More Dangerous.

If I Still Lived In Russia, I'd Be Dead... Or A Really Effective Oligarch.

My Hair Would Continue To Gray, And Then One Day, It Would Fall Out Entirely, And Then, On A Day Meaninglessly Close To The Present One, Meaninglessly Like The Present One, I Would Disappear From The Earth. And All These Emotions, All These Yearnings, All These Data, If That Helps To Clinch The Enormity Of What I'm Talking About, Would Be Gone. And That's What Immortality Means. It Means Selfishness. My Generations Belief That Each One Of Us Matters More Than You Or Anyone Else Would Think.

I Write Five, Six Days A Week. The Thing Is Capturing The Voice. I Feel Like I've Been Perfecting One Voice - In Different Iterations, Sure, But The Russian-ness Has Always Been The Undercurrent.

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?

You Are Not What You Want. You Are What Wants You Back.

If You Stop Thinking, If You Stop Wondering, You Die.

The Best Thing About The Iphone Is This That Tells Me Where I Am All The Time. Theres Never A Need To Feel Lost Anymore.

Let's See If I Can Write About Something Other Than My Heart.

We're People Of The Orient. We Know Everything. And What We Don't Know, We Can Sense.

Reading Is Difficult. People Just Aren't Meant To Read Anymore. We're In A Post-literate Age. You Know, A Visual Age. How Many Years After The Fall Of Rome Did It Take For A Dante To Appear? Many, Many Years.

I Have Some Memories Of Certain Things That Happened In High School When I Was Stoned Out Of My Mind, But I Talked With Other People About Them, And I Trusted The Aggregated Memories.

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I'm The Fortieth Ugliest Man In This Bar. But So What! So What!... Isn't This How People Used To Fall In Love?

Falling In Love

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Life For Young American College Graduates Is A Festive Affair. Free Of Having To Support Their Families, They Mostly Have Gay Parties On Rooftops Where They Reflect At Length Upon Their Quirky Electronic Childhoods And Sometimes Kiss Each Other On The Lips And Neck.

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Vodka Is A Wonderful Drink. You Can Drink So Much Of It Without Being As Hung Over As You Would If You Were Drinking One Of The Brown Liquors - The Whiskeys And Such. It's A Great Drink To Go With Appetizers.

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American Fiction Is Good. It Would Be Nice If Somebody Read It.

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I Write Almost Entirely In Bed Or On A Couch With My Feet Up On The Coffee Table. I Feel Most Creative When Im Looking Out The Window, And My Bed And Couch Have Nice Views Of The New York Skyline.

I Feel Safe With Him Because He Is So Not My Ideal And I Feel Like I Can Be Myself Because I'm Not In Love With Him.

A Writer Or Any Suffering Artist-to-be Is Just An Instrument Too Finely Set To The Human Condition [...]

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.

Asthmatic Immigrant Learns To Breathe By Writing.

In A Strange Way, I Expected Russia To Become More Like America Since The Soviet Union Collapsed, But The Reverse Is True. America Has Become More Like Russia: A Kleptocratic Society.

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I Don't Have Many Possessions, Apart From My Books.

I Love Paul Giamatti - God, That Man Is Like A Walking Chekhov. His Connection To Humanity Is Unbelievable, And Those Feelings Of Low Self-esteem - The Way That All Comes Together On The Screen? Delicious.

Usually, With A Novel, You Start With No Idea What To Do Because Your Job Is To Create Convincing Characters And Then They Just Run Around Getting Crazy. The Problem With Writing A Memoir, Obviously, Is You Can't Do That Because You Sort Of Know What's Going To Happen. Because You're The Character.

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.

By Reading This Message You Are Denying Its Existence And Implying Consent.

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On That Night I Was Left With Only The Truth That Nothing Of Our Personality Survives After Death, That In The End All That Was Misha Vainberg Would Evaporate Along With The Styles And Delusions Of His Epoch, Leaving Behind Not One Flutter Of His Sad Heavy Brilliance, Not One Damp Spot Around Which His Successors Could Congregate To Appreciate His Life And Times.

My Parents Were Kind Enough To Spend Hours Talking To Me.

The Love I Felt For Her On That Train Ride Had A Capital And Provinces, Parishes And A Vatican, An Orange Planet And Many Sullen Moons -- It Was Systemic And It Was Complete.

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.

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.

Getting Out Of Russia Was The Best Thing My Parents Did. I Mean, That Country Will Never Amount To Anything.

It Is A Capital Insult In This Country Not To Make Love To A Naked Woman, Even If She Is Related To You.

Silence Has Been Destroyed, But Also The Idea That It's Important To Learn How Another Person Thinks, To Enter The Mind Of Another Person. The Whole Idea Of Empathy Is Gone. We Are Now Part Of This Giant Machine Where Every Second We Have To Take Out A Device And Contribute Our Thoughts And Opinions.

Satire Always Benefits When Evil And Stupidity Collide.

We Are Now Part Of This Giant Machine Where Every Second We Have To Take Out A Device And Contribute Our Thoughts And Opinions.

If You Read Only One Memoir By A Disaffected, Urban, 20-something Jewish Girl This Year, Make It This One. Shukert Rocks The Lulav.

I Am Born Hungry. Ravenous. I Want To Eat The World, And I Can Never Be Satiated.

Remember This... Develop A Sense Of Nostalgia For Something, Or You'll Never Figure Out What's Important.

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