Hanya Yanagihara

“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.”

“He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt the same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but is wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in these moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I know my life's meaningful because"- and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued- "because I'm a good friend. i love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”

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

“But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn't remember being a child and being able to define happiness (...) "I think he's shy," he finished”

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

“One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.”

“Eating local is a relatively new concept in American dining; for the Italians, it's a way of life.”

“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.”

“Without them, one’s status as an adult is never secure; a childless adult creates adulthood for himself , and as exhilarating as it often is, it is also a state of perpetual insecurity”

“I didn’t intend the book as anything therapeutic and I don't think that’s a novel’s goal or responsibility.”

“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.”