Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Hanya Yanagihara

Related Quotes:

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" I wanted to see how flavors, spices, and grains traveled back and forth along the Silk Road and were interpreted by a multitude of cultures' palates. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" I have only a few really enviable skills, but packing - condensing just the right amount of stuff into a single bag, whether the trip is for a weekend or, as in this case, seven weeks - is one of them. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

" 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

" 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

" I was interested about how relationships change as you get older. You are great friends in your 20s. In your 30s, you get married. Your 40s are all about your kids. In your 50s, you get divorced, and your friendships become primary again. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" When we think of India, most of us are in fact thinking of Rajasthan, that large splotch of dun-colored desert in the country's northwest which, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, was ruled by a succession of maharajas whose sense of color, opulence, and splendor created the most enduring images of India in the West. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" I have never wanted a family. I don't believe in marriage, though I obviously believe it should be legal for everyone who wants to do it. But it is not something I believe in, nor do the characters in my book, nor do any of my friends. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara