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Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.

Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Remember
Important
Something
Never
Nostalgia
Develop
Figure
Figures
Sense

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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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I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.
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I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.
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You want to read a book? That requires introspection. It requires time away from people and time away from the constant need to communicate and to connect.
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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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My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
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We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.
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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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If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.
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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?
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Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
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Russia tried to introduce beer as kind of the new vodka - and it's working with younger people in major cities - but you can have ten shots of vodka and be perfectly okay. If I had ten beers, I would be liquidated.
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Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.
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freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
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If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.
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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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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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The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
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Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends.
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