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" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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" The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

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

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.com. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way. "

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

" Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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

" There is something uniquely American about the motel: It speaks to the transient nature of America itself, one enabled and encouraged by our roads and highways. "

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

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

Hanya Yanagihara

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

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

" 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 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

" 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