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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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" I think at first I didn't tell anyone I was writing something because I found so tedious the people who did. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" Jaipur, like Florence or Kyoto, other artisan-rich cities to which it roughly compares, has always been known for its craftsmanship. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" Where most of the country is, well, hot - from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south - Kashmir is cool: so cool, in fact, that in the winter, the temperatures can sink to sub-zero. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete - a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" No religion makes more use of color than Hinduism, with its blue-skinned gods and peony-lipped goddesses, and even the spring festival of Holi is focused on color: Boys squirt arcs of dyed water on passersby or dump powder, all violently hued, on their marks. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" Between their rise in the thirteenth century and their sudden fall in the seventeenth, when the line abruptly ended, the Medicis produced three popes, two queens, and many Florentine rulers, and they supported the work of Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli - a veritable parade of geniuses. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" If the only thing you knew about Oman was its location, you might never go at all. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" I live in Soho in lower New York; there's tons and tons of tourists right outside my door step, obviously. Most of them are European, and all of them have guidebooks. I never see anyone looking at a phone. "

Hanya Yanagihara