Author Profile
Jhumpa Lahiri
1967 • American • Author
61
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 61 quotesI feel my writing comes from a desire to... well, it's motivated by many things, but it's inherently a contradiction in that I'm writing for myself, and it's a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw meaning from, just personally.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I think there are a lot of misconceptions on both sides, the developing vs. the developed world, especially about America. I've felt the frustration in my lack of belonging to any one place, but I've also felt it liberating to be able to appreciate something without feeling disloyal to my own culture.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something.— Jhumpa Lahiri
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.— Jhumpa Lahiri
Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.— Jhumpa Lahiri
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of that, actually.— Jhumpa Lahiri
With 'Interpreter,' I didn't know it was ever going to be a book, that they were going to be published. I was writing them in a vacuum for the most part. They were my apprentice work. Then the stories happened to become a book.— Jhumpa Lahiri
In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment.— Jhumpa Lahiri
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.— Jhumpa Lahiri
On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I have two passports because I have to have at least one, and I really don't know how I define myself. And I feel that as I get older, I feel very fortunate to have, on paper, a dual nationality.— Jhumpa Lahiri
I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called 'Centuria,' which contains 100 stories, each of them about a page long. They're somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write.— Jhumpa Lahiri
My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.— Jhumpa Lahiri