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If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

Gary Shteyngart

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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Effective
Russia
Lived
Dead
Stills
Still
Really

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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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By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.
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Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
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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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I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
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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.
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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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Italy has sun and tomatoes, and Russia just has real problems.
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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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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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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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That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention they make you confuse attention for mercy.
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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.
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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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Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
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I don't have many possessions, apart from my books.
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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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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.
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freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
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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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