Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

Every pilot I've ever written, I've fallen deeply and madly in love with. It's the only way I work.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

When you're actually inside the experience of writing something, in some ways, you're just writing. Ultimately, you fall in love with the characters, and you get excited about the story, and you're sitting there in your sweatpants or pajamas, and you do get a little lost in it.

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed. I don't think my style has changed very much at all - though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.

I've never abandoned the novel.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.