Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and travel writer of Hawaiian ancestry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
science writer
The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.
writers written
I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
parts putting
So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.
height politics
I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.
complicit viewer
Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault.
born moved
I was born in L.A., then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to New York, then we moved to Baltimore, then we moved to California, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to Texas, then we moved to Hawaii, then we moved to California. This was before I was 17.
cruel hard people society tough trying various work
Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough.
encounters generally generous meeting page people successful writer writers
I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person.
cuisine flavor ingenious love tastes vietnamese work
I love how Vietnamese cuisine always tastes like flowers, and how they had the ingenious idea of pairing that floral flavor with seafood: such a combination shouldn't work as well as it does.
In Mumbai, the air is saltier. The sea is roilier. The traffic is snarlier. The pinks are pinker. The ostentation is crazier.
consider devalued friendship gets move partner people relationship
I think for a lot of people, friendship is a relationship that gets devalued once they move on to what people consider to be more important relationships: once you find a partner or when you have kids.
cool country dry heat hot sink south
Where most of the country is, well, hot - from the bone-baking dry heat of the desert to the flesh-melting humidity of Kerala in the south - Kashmir is cool: so cool, in fact, that in the winter, the temperatures can sink to sub-zero.
fixated frequent islands mapping since visitor
Any frequent visitor to Hawaii is fixated on mapping how the islands have changed since their last visit.
fiction fits goes interior itself presented work
I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.