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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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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Idea
Drilled
Jobs
Disaster
Away
Constantly
Ideas
Afraid
Always
Parents
Would
Lose
Loses
Parent

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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 are not what you want. You are what wants you back.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
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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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I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?
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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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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.
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Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
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The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
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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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The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
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Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.
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You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
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I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.
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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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