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" I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit. "

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" Sometimes, of course, there's no quick way to make it through immigration: Different airports have gluts of incoming flights at different times of day, and short of rearranging your flight schedule to ensure you'll land at a low-traffic hour, there's nothing you can do. "

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

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" I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap. "

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" Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party. "

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" We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not. "

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" The term 'pashmina' is often used interchangeably with 'cashmere,' but in reality, pashmina is a specific type of very fine, lofty cashmere, woven from a specific type of goat - one indigenous to northern India, Nepal, and Pakistan, and harvested and woven there as well. "

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" Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull. "

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" There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon. "

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" Once you join the queue for the immigration line, pay attention to what the expeditor tells you. Have your papers ready. Don't have your cell phone out. Take off your hat. Open your passport to the page with your photo and present it to the immigration officer already open. "

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" 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. "

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" In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better. "

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" There's something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone's actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven't. "

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" Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault. "

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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 was born in L.A., then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to New York, then we moved to Baltimore, then we moved to California, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to Texas, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to California. This was before I was 17. "

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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

" Part of adulthood is searching for the people who understand you. "

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" Publishing is a business, and I completely understand it. But when you don't have to depend on writing for your identity or your income, you can do whatever you want. "

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" Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop. "

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" One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them. "

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

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" I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else. "

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" Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" Those of us lucky enough to fall in love with Asia know that it's an affair that's as long as it is resonant. "

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