Literary Birthday – 20 September – Hanya Yanagihara

Happy Birthday, Hanya Yanagihara, born on 20 September 1974.

Hanya Yanagihara Quotes

1. This book was born from other people’s artwork: specifically, a few dozen paintings, drawings, and photographs I’d kept for years. I of course knew I was drawn to these images, but it wasn’t until I began imagining what this book might be that I realised that I had, in fact, been collecting the stuff of my novel itself. Here it was: in these images were the themes, the tones, the questions, and emotions that I wanted to convey not in light or colour, but in words. These are some of the pictures I turned to again and again as I wrote A Little Life. (Women’s Prize)
2. I was fortunate because I had parents who believed that being a writer was a perfectly acceptable thing to want to be. … And they let me listen to their conversations, they let me be present in rooms while things were being discussed: they let me observe. There is little better training for a writer than that. (The Believer)
3. As with editing, I think my strength as a writer is structure. It’s not a skill that’s much discussed when we discuss fiction, or not as much as language or character development anyway, but it’s the first thing I determine before I begin writing—not just books, but anything. I think I know how to pace a narrative well. I think I’m aware of repetition, that I try to create different kinds of sentences as often as I can. Those are all things I learned from magazine editing. (The Believer)
4. Writing should be indulgent: you should take big risks on the page, you should make big mistakes, you should be excessive at times. I let myself do as a writer what I probably would be less likely to allow as an editor. (The Believer)
5. When you want to be a writer, you think that actually getting published will make you feel somehow more real to yourself. But it doesn’t. And nor should it. If publication is the pole around which your entire identity pivots, you’re in big trouble. (The Believer)
6. If you’re a writer, you must be able to summon empathy for all your characters, even and especially the despicable ones. You needn’t like them, but you must respect them — even if you don’t respect every aspect of them. If not, that character becomes simply a catalog of his pathologies, and that’s a hollow character. Actually, that’s not even a character: it’s just a pastiche of bad behavior. (Electric Lit)
7. Fiction writing, is about being endlessly fascinated by the human condition — naming someone a monster is lazy; it allows you to stop thinking and questioning. (Electric Lit)
8. Any artist knows and yearns for that period—sometimes hours long, sometimes months—when you feel like you know exactly where you’re going, when your work is propelling you down a track so swift and smooth that you daren’t examine the landscape because you don’t want to disrupt the ride. That’s what it felt like for large, exhilarating parts of this book: It often seemed when I was sitting down to write that I was settling into a toboggan, readying to zoom down a slope. (National Book Foundation)
9. I don’t personally ascribe to the notion that you should write every day, but when you do have wind at your back, you should try to go for as long as you can. (ABA)
10. I write one draft and that’s the book. Of course, there are thousands of tweaks and changes and corrections that I make along the way, but I don’t do structural overhauls — I work it out before I actually start writing. (ABA)

Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. After graduating from college, she moved to New York, where she worked as a writer and editor for Condé Nast Traveler. Her first novel, The People in the Trees, was published in 2013 and was praised as one of the best novels of the year. She followed it with A Little Life in 2015. The bestselling novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Yanagihara’s third novel, To Paradise, was published in 2022 and reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. She is also known for her work as an editor and served as editor-in-chief of T Magazine. Follow her on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Sam Levy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hanya_crop-4×6-300dpi.tif

by Amanda Patterson
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