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
When we think of India, most of us are in fact thinking of Rajasthan, that large splotch of dun-colored desert in the country’s northwest which, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, was ruled by a succession of maharajas whose sense of color, opulence, and splendor created the most enduring images of India in the West. – Hanya Yanagihara
One of the things I’m fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them. – Hanya Yanagihara
The original Grand Tour would generally begin in Belgium or the Netherlands before moving through Paris, Geneva, Spain, Italy, and perhaps Greece. – Hanya Yanagihara
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
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. – Hanya Yanagihara
I don’t believe in post-racial or post-gay or post-anything, but I do think within a certain group of friends, what matters less is the specificities of race and sexuality, and what matters more is the shared experience, shared language and shared cultural touch points. – Hanya Yanagihara
Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there’s no one on earth who understands you. I don’t think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them. – 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 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. – 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
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
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
We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there. – Hanya Yanagihara
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 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. – Hanya Yanagihara
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
The speed limit on most of Maui’s highways is forty miles per hour, but my mother never went above thirty. – Hanya Yanagihara
What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader’s part. – Hanya Yanagihara
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. – 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
I’d be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I. – Hanya Yanagihara
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
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 at first I didn’t tell anyone I was writing something because I found so tedious the people who did. – Hanya Yanagihara
I think Bhutanese food – long dissed by every food writer out there – has gotten a bum rap. – 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
The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. – Hanya Yanagihara
