Latest Hanya Yanagihara Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• There are times I wish I didn't have a job, even though I love my job: I get to work with interesting, eccentric colleagues and equally interesting and eccentric subject matter, both of which are rarities. But, naturally, I would treasure having more freedom someday: of time and of movement. Will I always have a full-time job? I don't know. But I do know that I need to spend at least part of my week in an office, with other people.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  People, Interesting, Office

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• Witing is essentially interior work, and many writers are interior personalities. Having a job forces you out of the world of your work, and into the one in which you get to observe people. Yes, you can imagine all this, but as a fiction writer, you can never observe enough the rhythms of how humans move through the world. A job demands that you structure your time much more carefully. You learn how to be resourceful, and that in turn provides a certain intensity of focus.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Moving, People, Focus

  Source: www.believermag.com

• When you never leave the literary biosphere, you forget how few people actually read books, and that in turn makes you start overestimating both your ability to make money and your relative renown, which has dangerous consequences: the first means you may end up in debt; the second means you may end up a horrid bore.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Book, Mean, People

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• When you don't have to depend upon your creative work for money, you'll never really have to compromise... Knowing that is hugely liberating as well as artistically clarifying... Being practical about where your money comes from means you can be romantic about your writing... I believe that a healthy society is one that supports its artists, but I also know that that privilege, of being only an artist, is afforded to just a small number. Most of us have to find something else - or live a highly disciplined life, which I'm not willing to do.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Believe, Writing, Mean

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• Health insurance, which is exceedingly difficult to secure as an individual in New York. Obamacare, while certainly better than nothing, is pretty awful, and if you have a complicated health history, as I do, you need premium insurance, which means private insurance. The challenge, though, is finding a company that will give you the privilege of paying up to $1,400 a month for it. When I didn't have a job, I spent more time thinking about insurance - not just paying for it, but securing it in the first place - than I wanted to.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Mean, Thinking, Giving

  Source: www.believermag.com

• When you want to be a writer, you think that actually getting published will make you feel somehow more real to yourself. But it doesn't. And nor should it. If publication is the pole around which your entire identity pivots, you're in big trouble. I'd also add that many wonderful books by brilliant authors get ignored or overlooked, and that poor sales aren't (necessarily) a measure of your abilities.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Real, Book, Thinking

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• When you're young, your perception of what it means to be a writer is often less about the writing and more about what seems to be the accompanying life: speeches and travel and hanging out with other writers. You think that when you get published, your life will clarify itself to you somehow. But when you don't get published until you're middle-aged you know who you are already, and your life expands to make room for your writing, rather than orbiting around it. You realize that there's no one way to be a writer, and that the job is less of an identity and more of a vocation.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.believermag.com

• There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Writing, Enjoy

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• Many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sexuality. And sometimes the differences are smaller. ... Where authors get into trouble is in trying to make those different characters stand in for whole groups of people, or for creating characters only to fetishize or explore their supposed otherness. Your character can be wildly different from you, as long as he's written with respect and, moreover, specificity.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Writing, Character, Long

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• Does people not asking me about Asian American literature mean they don't see it as its own literary tradition? I certainly believe in it as its own literary tradition, because your race plays a great factor in how you are seen by the world, and how you see the world; the fact that I'm an Asian American isn't incidental to who I am as a writer. Where it becomes difficult is defining what, if anything identifiable at all, makes an Asian American book an Asian American book, other than the fact of its creator being Asian. And I'd argue that there is nothing identifiable beyond that.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Believe, Book, Mean

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• I have a sustained interest in frippery. I can't refute the monster accusation, either. Some writers are awful on the page and kind in person. More often it's the other way around. I'd say I'm probably the same amount of asshole on the page as in life. I do try to be entertaining about it, however - in both places.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Trying, Kind, Accusation

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• Many writers hate the shilling process, and I understand that. However, it's really the only thing about the publication process you can somewhat control. You can't affect reviews. But you can try to find your book an audience. One of the problems with the book publishing industry is that their publicity efforts tend to be spent on people who already read, and know how to discover, literary fiction.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Hate, Book, People

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• I have one friend to whom I've told more than I've ever told anyone, and yet there are significant territories I have and will never let him access - in large part because I'm trying to protect him, and one of the responsibilities of loving someone is protecting him or her, even if who you're protecting them from is yourself.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Responsibility, Loving Someone, Trying

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• We're living in a literary age, at least in America, that is marked by a sense of distance, a coolness, in all senses of that word. To be too obviously, unapologetically emotional is to risk being considered foolish, or at the very least not serious.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Distance, Emotional, Risk

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• Of death, my father has always said that the best conditions are the ones in which you have plenty of time to prepare - to say what you need to say; to arrange your estate - and the ones in which you get to choose, or at least have some knowledge of, how and when it might happen. One can't elude death, but one can have a good death.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Father, Plenty

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• I'm not sure a person ever really reveals the whole of himsels or herself to another person, and I'm not sure we should. Or rather, just because you don't, it doesn't mean you can't have a meaningful relationship with another person. It's important to remember that this idea of confessing your most shameful, embarrassing stories and self to someone else as an expression of love and intimacy is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a new definition of what it means to be close to someone. After all, the self is by its nature secretive.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Meaningful, Important, Remember

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Much of an editor's job is in fact pretty nanny-like in nature: in many ways, you're there to protect and defend, to reassure and clean up. What I ask from writers is respect. I want them to respect me enough to turn in a clean draft. I want that draft to be as good as they can make it. I want to feel the thought behind those words. And I want it to be turned in on time. It drives me wild when I get a story that's obviously slapped together, and the same can be said for a manuscript; you should respect your reader enough to give her something that reflects your best efforts.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Giving, Effort, Together

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• I'm an indulgent writer - I'm not sure, however, that's something I'm interested in changing. Writing should be indulgent: you should take big risks on the page, you should make big mistakes, you should be excessive at times. I let myself do as a writer what I probably would be less likely to allow as an editor.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Mistake, Writing, Risk

  Source: www.believermag.com

• Sometimes the most difficult thing you can do as an editor is not make a single note - the idea that everything and everyone needs editing is, in reality, a fiction. I've gotten pieces where I thought, Well, I could do this or that, or change this word, but in the end, I leave it. Changing something is not necessarily equivalent to making the piece more true to itself, which is the point of editing: it's just changing it because you feel you can or should or must.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Reality, Sometimes, Difficult

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• As with editing, I think my strength as a writer is structure. It's not a skill that's much discussed when we discuss fiction, or not as much as language or character development anyway, but it's the first thing I determine before I begin writing - not just books, but anything. I think I know how to pace a narrative well. I think I'm aware of repetition, that I try to create different kinds of sentences as often as I can. Those are all things I learned from magazine editing.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Book, Writing, Character

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• My great strength as an editor, I believe, is structure: I know how to reorder a piece, I know how to reach into a jumbled story and extract the important narrative. And I can do both of these things very fast. I also think I've become better at cutting text. You don't always relish it, of course, but by now I know how to distill something without sacrificing its essence.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Believe, Cutting, Sacrifice

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• I know I'm a better editor than I was when I began, twenty years ago. I'm less scared of the text, I'm less scared of the writer, and, crucially, I no longer believe that I have to leave my mark on every story.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Believe, Scared

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• I was fortunate because I had parents who believed that being a writer was a perfectly acceptable thing to want to be. They'd actually hoped that I might be an artist, and I was lucky again to grow up with people who delighted in making things: my father wove baskets and painted furniture and carved wood figures; my mother quilted and embroidered and sewed.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Mother, Growing Up, Father

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.

• Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Smart, Book, People

  Interview with Alexis Cheung, believermag.com. November 20, 2017.