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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
Point
Answer
Stills
City
Cloaked
Becomes
Yorker
Still
Cities
Obstinate
Every
Question
Returning
Love
Ready
Despair
Answers
Mines
Asks
Mine

More quotes by Gary Shteyngart

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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.
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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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'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?
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.
Gary Shteyngart
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My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.
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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I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings - weaker than me, and I was already very weak - I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward.
Gary Shteyngart
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American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
Gary Shteyngart
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I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.
Gary Shteyngart
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You can't have a Russian household without vodka. It's just something to wash everything down with. I can't remember a time when I didn't drink vodka, either in Russia or here. I don't think there's ever a wrong time to start drinking it. My ancestors drank it, and if I ever have any children, they'll be drinking it.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
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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My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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A lot of the ways of advertising a book - the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore - those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart