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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. "
Hanya Yanagihara
You
Never
Possible
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" 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
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" I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap. "
Hanya Yanagihara
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" 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
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Nice
" 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
" 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
" Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Unhappiness
Death
End
" In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Air
Mumbai
Sea
" 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
Winter
Hot
Cool
" 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
Focused
Spring
Color
" 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
Work
Beginning
Science
" 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
Perfect
Bag
Day
" 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
Photography
Lot
Kind
" 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
" 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
Because
Career
Her
" 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
You
Human Being
See
" 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
Who
Book
Difference
" 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 process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Science
More
Process
" 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
" 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
" 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
Bag
Weekend
Skills
" 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
" 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
" I go to Japan every November on vacation, and the one thing I never return home without is yuba, which is the thin skin that forms atop boiling soy milk. You skim it off and either eat it fresh or dry it. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Vacation
Eat
Home
" 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
" What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Relationship
Found
Group
" The first thing I do whenever I go to Thailand is seek out the closest restaurant or stall selling mango-and-sticky rice: it's a little hillock of glutinous rice drenched in lashings of coconut milk and served with fresh mango. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Milk
Fresh
Restaurant
" Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination. "
Hanya Yanagihara
Kashmir
India
Imagination
" 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
" 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
Successful
People
Thought