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

Hanya Yanagihara

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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. "

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

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

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" Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" The original Grand Tour would generally begin in Belgium or the Netherlands before moving through Paris, Geneva, Spain, Italy, and perhaps Greece. "

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" 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

" 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

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

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. "

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