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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.
Gary Shteyngart
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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Always
Mortality
Think
Lets
Thinking
Clearly
Writers
Growing
Death
Really
Good
Brink
More quotes by Gary Shteyngart
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.
Gary Shteyngart
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
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.
Gary Shteyngart
Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
Gary Shteyngart
Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.
Gary Shteyngart
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.
Gary Shteyngart
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
I have a great memory. And actually, I remember Russia in some ways better than I remember Queens.
Gary Shteyngart
Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.
Gary Shteyngart
Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends.
Gary Shteyngart
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
Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
Gary Shteyngart
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
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
I love Paul Giamatti - God, that man is like a walking Chekhov. His connection to humanity is unbelievable, and those feelings of low self-esteem - the way that all comes together on the screen? Delicious.
Gary Shteyngart
The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
Gary Shteyngart
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
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.
Gary Shteyngart
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
You can't have a Russian household without vodka. It's just something to wash everything down with. I can't remember a time when I didn't drink vodka, either in Russia or here. I don't think there's ever a wrong time to start drinking it. My ancestors drank it, and if I ever have any children, they'll be drinking it.
Gary Shteyngart
