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Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
Gary Shteyngart
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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Asthmatic
Immigrant
Learns
Immigrants
Breathe
Writing
More quotes by 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
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
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.
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
Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.
Gary Shteyngart
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
I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.
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
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 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
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
You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
Gary Shteyngart
American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.
Gary Shteyngart
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.
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
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
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
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.
Gary Shteyngart
If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
Gary Shteyngart