Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Profession : Author

Birth : July 11, 1967

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.

Jhumpa Lahiri

A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.

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

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

Jhumpa Lahiri

You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take risks. It's better to do something that's not perfect and successful every time. It's important to be fearless and move forward, to learn from what went wrong.

Jhumpa Lahiri

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.

Jhumpa Lahiri

At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Many of my characters struggle with loneliness, that is fair to say.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I'm the least-experimental writer. The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that's never really interested me.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process of writing: one climbs and is continuously moving with each book. Becoming a mother is the greatest connection I've ever felt to being spiritual.

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

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

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 would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.

Jhumpa Lahiri

You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I've realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn't feel a part of any tradition. I think that would have been too overwhelming, in a sense.

Jhumpa Lahiri