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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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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Confuse
Tyrants
Mercy
Guess
Attention
Make
Covet

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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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You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.
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The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.
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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.
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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!
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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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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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I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.
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My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
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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.
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You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
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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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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.
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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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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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I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
Gary Shteyngart
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Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.
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Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
Gary Shteyngart
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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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We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.
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