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Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.

Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Problem
Real
Tomatoes
Italy
Russia
Sun
Problems

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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 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.
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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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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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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.
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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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If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
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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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freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
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I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
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People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.
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Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
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My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
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You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
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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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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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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.
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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 America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.
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