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

Hanya Yanagihara

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" 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

" 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

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" 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

" 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

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

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 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

" Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination. "

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

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

Hanya Yanagihara

" Unlike Milan, Italy's banking capital, or Rome, its religious center, Florence was the place where the rich went to buy goods that would showcase how wealthy they were. "

Hanya Yanagihara

" Every traveler knows too well the endless quest for the perfect travel bag: the one that's stylish enough to carry through Paris, sturdy enough to tote around Peru, and - most important - doesn't make your shoulder sag even before you've loaded it up with everything you need for a day of sightseeing. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

Hanya Yanagihara

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

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 think I passed up a lot of opportunities for love because I was too interested in identity politics. "

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

" 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 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

" 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 don't think that genius goes hand in hand with being socially inept or being a sociopath or being a misanthrope, but I do think that it is a mind that can think so differently - so beyond how one is supposed to think. "

Hanya Yanagihara