Hanya Yanagihara Quotes
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I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.
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Be aware of who in your life is actually interested in hearing you discuss your writing, and who's just asking to be polite. Listening to writers talk about their work is often excruciatingly dull.
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Anyone who has been to India - specifically Rajasthan, the rich and kingly region in the country's northwest - knows that when it comes to adornment, Indians do not think like other people.
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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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One of the things I'm fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them.
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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.
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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.
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I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party.
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I think there are patterns of the aftermath of colonization that you see echoed in cultures and communities across the world.
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I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.
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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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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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I live in Soho in lower New York; there's tons and tons of tourists right outside my door step, obviously. Most of them are European, and all of them have guidebooks. I never see anyone looking at a phone.