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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
Stills
Still
Really
Effective
Russia
Lived
Dead

More quotes by 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.
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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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Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
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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.
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Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
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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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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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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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Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.
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By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.
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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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In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.
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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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The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
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American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
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.
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Vodka is a wonderful drink. You can drink so much of it without being as hung over as you would if you were drinking one of the brown liquors - the whiskeys and such. It's a great drink to go with appetizers.
Gary Shteyngart
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You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.
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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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The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
Gary Shteyngart