Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

I'm such a coward that unless I get a good writer, I don't want to make a picture.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn't matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

I wrote a lot of fiction, but it was just college stuff. It seems to me you have to be so confident in yourself to become a writer.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

I don't have the fear I won't be able to think of something else to write. It's what I do.

I can't read fiction when I'm writing fiction, because I get intimidated if I read something really good.

I haven't read a book in a very, very long time because, when I'm writing, I don't like to see other people's work. I don't want to see something great and not be able to use it, and I don't want to have any subconscious influences.

You don't know what you need when you're a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you're deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement.

Every time I've written a book, I'm like, 'Oh, it's so different from the last one. Are they going to like it?'

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Writing is inherently scary.

I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but (for me, at least) there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

Everyone thinks when they start writing that they can't do it. I was lucky. My sister Delia was the most important person in terms of encouraging me.