I always wanted to be a scientist. I don't really have any writer friends. The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist…

- Hanya Yanagihara

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about bein…

- Hanya Yanagihara

I have a sustained interest in frippery. I can't refute the monster accusation, either. Some writers are awful on the page and kind in person. More o…

- Hanya Yanagihara

We're living in a literary age, at least in America, that is marked by a sense of distance, a coolness, in all senses of that word. To be too obvious…

- Hanya Yanagihara

Of death, my father has always said that the best conditions are the ones in which you have plenty of time to prepare - to say what you need to say; …

- Hanya Yanagihara

If you start asking how do we make life meaningful and life never ends, then you get into sort of these terrible sort of metaphysical quandaries and …

- Hanya Yanagihara

In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange charac…

- Hanya Yanagihara

Many writers write across difference of one kind or another. Sometimes the difference is large and recognizable: gender, or race, or religion, or sex…

- Hanya Yanagihara

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 sho…

- Hanya Yanagihara