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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

In a basic sense, 'A Little Life' is a homage to how my friends and I live our lives. I wanted to push past the definitions of how we typically define friendship. It's a different version of adulthood, but it's no less important and no less legitimate than anyone else's.

— Hanya Yanagihara

In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.

— Hanya Yanagihara

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.

— Hanya Yanagihara

It's a good story,' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.'' Please,' I said. And then he did.

— Hanya Yanagihara

It was impossible to convince someone to live for his own sake. But he often thought it would be a more effective treatment to make people feel more urgently the necessity of living for others.

— Hanya Yanagihara

It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had... I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.

— 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

Lately, he had been wondering if codependency was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

— Hanya Yanagihara