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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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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Time
Requires
People
Communicate
Constant
Read
Away
Book
Need
Introspection
Needs
Connect

More quotes by 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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The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.
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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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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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freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.
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I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.
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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.
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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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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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You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
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Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
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I was a jackass in many ways. I projected that cruelty towards others, that kid whose hand I was wringing. If I could have hurt a hundred weaklings - weaker than me, and I was already very weak - I would. I was dying to hurt somebody, to pay it forward.
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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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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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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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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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The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
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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I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?
Gary Shteyngart
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Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
Gary Shteyngart