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" 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
Different
Control
How
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" 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
Work
Research
Health
" 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
" 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
Plant
Buildings
Sad
" The original Grand Tour would generally begin in Belgium or the Netherlands before moving through Paris, Geneva, Spain, Italy, and perhaps Greece. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Paris
Italy
Moving
" 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
Getting Better
Big
American
" 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. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Seafood
Love
Flowers
" If the only thing you knew about Oman was its location, you might never go at all. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Location
Knew
You
" 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
Losing
Battle
Living
" 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. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Late
Writing
You
" 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
Relationships
You
Friendship
" 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. "
Hanya Yanagihara
India
Well
Used
" 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
You
Never
Possible
" 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
You
Laugh
Funny
" The speed limit on most of Maui's highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Mother
Speed
Never
" 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
Fall
Long
Know
" Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Work
People
Society
" 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
Color
Thinking
Think
" 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
Story
College
Identity
" 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
Culture
Moment
Respect
" 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
Book
Marriage
Family
" 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
Complexity
Room
Retail
" 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. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Traveled
Way
Day
" I think for a lot of people, friendship is a relationship that gets devalued once they move on to what people consider to be more important relationships: once you find a partner or when you have kids. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Think
People
Friendship
" 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
Born
New York
California
" Of course, no one has enough time to see every shop that Mumbai has: That would take more lifetimes than even the gods could offer. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Time
Enough
More
" We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Little
Nothing
Because
" The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Science
More
Process
" When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Conservative
Kids
More
" 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
Two
Fall
Three
" 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
Road
Cultures
See