Quote

When you're 21 you think, Old people sound like this. Old people think like this. I don't think my ideas about aging and about eternal life changed that much, but it became more poignant to me as I did get older and I could better imagine, as you sort of inch closer to death every day, why legacy, more than aging, becomes important to people.

Hanya Yanagihara

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Hanya Yanagihara
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: September 20
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
LA
California
Life
Death
Older
Like
Ideas
Became
People
Better
Eternal
Important
Becomes
Poignant
Much
Changed
Inch
Every
Sort
Legacy
Think
Imagine
Closer
Thinking
Sound
Aging

More quotes by Hanya Yanagihara

Image
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 to arrange your estate - and the ones in which you get to choose, or at least have some knowledge of, how and when it might happen. One can't elude death, but one can have a good death.
Hanya Yanagihara
Image
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 being a writer.
Hanya Yanagihara
Image
I have one friend to whom I've told more than I've ever told anyone, and yet there are significant territories I have and will never let him access - in large part because I'm trying to protect him, and one of the responsibilities of loving someone is protecting him or her, even if who you're protecting them from is yourself.
Hanya Yanagihara
Image
In the 1950s that tug-of-war between the expectations of behaving normally and the limitlessness of thinking freely produces some very strange characters.
Hanya Yanagihara
Image
When you never leave the literary biosphere, you forget how few people actually read books, and that in turn makes you start overestimating both your ability to make money and your relative renown, which has dangerous consequences: the first means you may end up in debt the second means you may end up a horrid bore.
Hanya Yanagihara
Image
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 often it's the other way around. I'd say I'm probably the same amount of asshole on the page as in life. I do try to be entertaining about it, however - in both places.
Hanya Yanagihara
Image
It is always sort of unnerving to hear from people who've read my books. I'm not reading any of the reviews and most of my friends haven't read it - they bought it, which is all I frankly care about, but they haven't read it.
Hanya Yanagihara