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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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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Things
Contemplation
Vital
Entertainment
Remain
Exist
Fiction
Force

More quotes by 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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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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Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
Gary Shteyngart
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You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
Gary Shteyngart
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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 was really not a good student, and I felt that shame every day. That's one of the reasons I started smoking pot and drinking daily.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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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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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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.
Gary Shteyngart
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Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
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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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
Gary Shteyngart
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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.
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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freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
Gary Shteyngart