Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

I actually enjoy writing longer books because you have even more to get your storytelling teeth into.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

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

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.