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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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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Hand
Brain
Submissive
Turns
Entirely
Makes
Mercy
Hands
Parts
Become
Quiet
Work
Fiction
Good
Turn

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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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That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.
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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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You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.
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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.
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Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
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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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Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.
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If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
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Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
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I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.
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