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We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.

Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
People
Orient
Sense
Everything

More quotes by Gary Shteyngart

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American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
Gary Shteyngart
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By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.
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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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
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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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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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I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
Gary Shteyngart
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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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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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You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
Gary Shteyngart
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freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
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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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