Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

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  • born 1975
  • 124 quotes

Hanya Yanagihara (born 1975), is quoted 124 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Identity, The Only Thing, Hawaii and Highways.

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Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway.

Part of adulthood is searching for the people who understand you.

When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids.

Hong Kong has plenty of superlative hotels, amazing food, and cool shopping.

If the only thing you knew about Oman was its location, you might never go at all.

We imbue deserts and the tundra with menace because nothing, or little, grows there.

I think Bhutanese food - long dissed by every food writer out there - has gotten a bum rap.

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

I think I passed up a lot of opportunities for love because I was too interested in identity politics.

I'd be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.

Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit.

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

So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.

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

We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not.

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.

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination.

What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others.

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

In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.

I think there are patterns of the aftermath of colonization that you see echoed in cultures and communities across the world.

Friendship is one of our most treasured relationships, but it isn't codified and celebrated; it's never going to give you a party.

Of course, no one has enough time to see every shop that Mumbai has: That would take more lifetimes than even the gods could offer.

Jaipur, like Florence or Kyoto, other artisan-rich cities to which it roughly compares, has always been known for its craftsmanship.

One of the things I'm fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them.

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.

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

You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.

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.

Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough.

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.

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.

Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault.

I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.

I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.

There is something uniquely American about the motel: It speaks to the transient nature of America itself, one enabled and encouraged by our roads and highways.

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.

One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist.

Publishing is a business, and I completely understand it. But when you don't have to depend on writing for your identity or your income, you can do whatever you want.

In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.

Unlike Milan, Italy's banking capital, or Rome, its religious center, Florence was the place where the rich went to buy goods that would showcase how wealthy they were.

I took a 51 day trip through Asia; 12 countries and 26 cities. I traveled for 51 days. So, it was everywhere from Sri Lanka and that all the way to Japan, where we ended it.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

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.

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.

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and it gets really, really bleak looking.

Anyone who has been to India - specifically Rajasthan, the rich and kingly region in the country's northwest - knows that when it comes to adornment, Indians do not think like other people.

Hanya Yanagihara is quoted on

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