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" I go to Japan every November on vacation, and the one thing I never return home without is yuba, which is the thin skin that forms atop boiling soy milk. You skim it off and either eat it fresh or dry it. "

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" I think there are patterns of the aftermath of colonization that you see echoed in cultures and communities across the world. "

Hanya Yanagihara

See

Think

World

" I really don't have anything urgent to say, and I think you shouldn't write unless you have something urgent to say. Sometimes that troubles me, and sometimes I don't really care. "

Hanya Yanagihara

Sometimes

Care

" Anyone who has been to India - specifically Rajasthan, the rich and kingly region in the country's northwest - knows that when it comes to adornment, Indians do not think like other people. "

" I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person. "

" One of the things I'm fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them. "

" I think I passed up a lot of opportunities for love because I was too interested in identity politics. "

" Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear. "

" I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends. "

" So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down. "

Hanya Yanagihara

Fun

Words

" I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example. "

" The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango. "

" I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character. "

" I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner. "

" The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty. "

" My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned. "

" You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being. "

" What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others. "

" In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier. "

" I took a 51 day trip through Asia; 12 countries and 26 cities. I traveled for 51 days. So, it was everywhere from Sri Lanka and that all the way to Japan, where we ended it. "

" Eating local is a relatively new concept in American dining; for the Italians, it's a way of life. "

" Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them. "

" We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there. "

" Although both of us were raised on Oahu, in Honolulu, my mother has always had fond memories of Maui; this was, after all, where she and my father, then penniless yet oddly optimistic newlyweds, honeymooned in 1969. "

" In a basic sense, 'A Little Life' is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It's a different version of adulthood, but it's no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else's. "

" We think of the 1950s as an oppressive time in the culture, and indeed it was, but it was also in many ways a more secular moment, and one in which great scientific achievements flourished. I don't want to get too gauzy about this, but there was much more respect for science as a necessary part of society. "

" We think of writing a book as a process, but the very word - process - suggests that there is one: a template to follow, a map to guide us. If that were true, someone would have surely figured out some marketable method we could all buy. "

" I love how Vietnamese cuisine always tastes like flowers, and how they had the ingenious idea of pairing that floral flavor with seafood: such a combination shouldn't work as well as it does. "

" Go to any Shinto temple in Japan and you'll see it: a simple stand from which hang hundreds of wooden postcard-size plaques with a colorful image on one side and, on the other, densely scribbled Japanese characters in black felt-tip pen, pleas to the gods for help or succor. "

" The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book. "

" I don't believe in post-racial or post-gay or post-anything, but I do think within a certain group of friends, what matters less is the specificities of race and sexuality, and what matters more is the shared experience, shared language and shared cultural touch points. "