Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

Author Image

Jhumpa Lahiri

Profession : Author

Birth : July 11, 1967

It's easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.

Jhumpa Lahiri

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

Jhumpa Lahiri

The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

Jhumpa Lahiri

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

Jhumpa Lahiri

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.

Jhumpa Lahiri

There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.

Jhumpa Lahiri

My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it's very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I feel very grateful for the way I was brought up. I did not realise it then, but as I grew older and started writing and realised the material that was there was very strong, I felt very grateful that my life was complicated and that my identity was never clear but put me in a position that was always questioned.

Jhumpa Lahiri

The Italians always know that I'm not Italian.

Jhumpa Lahiri

American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York.

Jhumpa Lahiri

It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived with this all my life - this divide, this bifurcation. And in Italy, I don't feel it. There's none of that tension, only the expectation I place on myself to speak the language well. I find it relaxing. Something drops away, and I observe.

Jhumpa Lahiri

When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

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

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

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