Gary Shteyngart Quotes

Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

I used to love writing in my journal.

Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

As a youngster, when I started writing and stuff, I did actually write more from other people's perspectives. When I hit 18 and something happened to me that hurt me, I discovered that writing the truth is really therapeutic and amazing.

I was almost teaching myself through writing without even realizing it. It's like therapy. You can hear my progression as a person and how much happier I became, which is really cool for me to hear because I'm proud of myself.

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.

At this point in my life, I'm probably not gonna be able to stop writing because it's gonna help me be able to do what I need to do.

Remember that the writing itself is good for you. If your story is so close to home that you are afraid to write it, it probably means you need to write it.

When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.

Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are tendered conscious.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

I write to give myself strength.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some) for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system.

Love is what makes you do everything. It really does conquer all. With my first album, I was writing about empowerment hoping that would make it true. And now it is. I'm in charge. I make the rules. I've been writing since I was nine years old and I'm very much involved in the creative process. And now that I'm in a happier place in my personal life, I'm spitting songs out left and right.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.