Quote

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

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Gary Shteyngart
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: July 5
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
St. Petersburg
Teach
Book
Books
Impart
Reading
Cares
Learn
Empathy
Stuff
Shouldn
Pick
Also
Gonna
Care
Fun
Better

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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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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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Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.
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People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.
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All of my books have an element of a man who is in love with somebody and needs them desperately, not just for procreation but for being able to fully unbosom himself. He only feels comfortable discussing things with women. Which is funny, because 80 percent of readers are women!
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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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My parents were kind enough to spend hours talking to me.
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If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.
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The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
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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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Alcohol causes a lot of problems, and then to solve these problems, you drink more.
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