Hanya Yanagihara Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• When you're 21 you think, "Old people sound like this. Old people think like this." I don't think my ideas about aging and about eternal life changed that much, but it became more poignant to me as I did get older and I could better imagine, as you sort of inch closer to death every day, why legacy, more than aging, becomes important to people.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Life Changing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• It is always sort of unnerving to hear from people who've read my books. I'm not reading any of the reviews and most of my friends haven't read it - they bought it, which is all I frankly care about, but they haven't read it.

  Hanya Yanagihara

  Book, Reading, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  5 Copy quote

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