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Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it's not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.

Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Stills
City
Cloaked
Still
Becomes
Yorker
Every
Cities
Obstinate
Love
Question
Returning
Ready
Despair
Answers
Mines
Asks
Mine
Point
Answer

More quotes by Gary Shteyngart

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The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
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If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
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Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.
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She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.
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I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.
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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.
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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 always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
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By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.
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Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.
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American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
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I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
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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.
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The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
Gary Shteyngart
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That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention they make you confuse attention for mercy.
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Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
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One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but they should also be fun. This stuff is fun! You shouldn't pick up a book and say, Oh my god, I'm gonna better myself by reading this. You may better yourself by reading this, but who cares? Just have fun.
Gary Shteyngart
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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!
Gary Shteyngart
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Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.
Gary Shteyngart
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In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.
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