Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

In a lot of films, they're showing more complete, developed characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds. The larger concern is to be able to tastefully explore the stereotypes, and still move past them to see the core of people.

I could never write a book where the point-of-view character was a short person, because I just can't imagine what that's like.

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

If fiction changes things, it's usually because it's a powerful way of exploring social issues. And it helps us to understand people who are different from us.

For writers, you just have to have the ability to not restrict your imagination. Men can write about women; women can write about men. Straight people can write about gay people; gay people can write about straight people.

It's not enough to be diverse in your casting. You have to service those characters; you have to make them fully well rounded because people are watching.

When depicting Asian people in movies, books, and television or as historical figures, it's more important to humanize them and give them all of the dimensions of humanity, and that includes sexuality. Ascribe the human the full range of human qualities.

Some people say, 'Well you're a man; how do you write about women or girls when you don't know about them?' Well, I've got my imagination, and I can write about women. Yes, I'll never be pregnant and give birth to children, but I can imagine a bit of what it's like. When you create characters, it's just about making them really real to people.

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.

The idea that we should write towards the unknown aspects of our experience was totally groundbreaking for me. It gave me the license I needed to try to write outside myself. This attitude has deeply informed my approach to fiction, emboldening me to write characters with voices or situations that are vastly different from my own.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

I think we need to tell stories that reflect our world.

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.

Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.

It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.

Trying to imagine what it's like to be someone else is never a substitute for actually living that way, for acknowledging the respect that we need to have for each other's experiences.

I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you should push yourself to try to persuade your reader that you have the authority to engage with people who, you know, lived in the past, who live in the future, other genders, other places, other cultures.

It's important to not marginalize any people group in fiction. A complete, authentic-feeling world should include many different elements of life and culture. For this reason, my books will almost always contain people of faith.

I know it's 'Dear White People,' and you can imprint all kinds of concessions about what the show might be about on the title, but my goal was never to, like, educate white people. My goal was always to create characters that you can relate to and fall in love with.

Immigrant characters now are getting much more well-rounded, and they have personalities, which is important because we do need to portray immigrants in a humanizing way.

What does it serve any studio to not reflect the lives of people who are giving you money, who are crying out to you, 'Hey, please tell our stories.'

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

If we truly seek diversity in fiction, we have to let the needs of others come before our need to define ourselves as social justice allies.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.