Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Profession : Author

Birth : July 11, 1967

I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.

Jhumpa Lahiri

The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

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

I write to feel alone.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I feel that Italy's a country that's constantly looking out and constantly following what's happening in other cultural centers. What is being written in America, what is being published in England, what is being published in France. It's a culture that's always wanting to absorb and inform itself of other works, other writers, etc., etc.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.

Jhumpa Lahiri

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

Jhumpa Lahiri

So much of my writing derives from these questions that I ask myself - things that are utterly beyond my personal set of experiences - and it's my attempt to try to... understand, to sort of break out of my own consciousness, you know, the limitations of my own life.

Jhumpa Lahiri

It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitant and afraid to pursue a creative life.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I don't tackle major global events. I don't like to read about something - an event, a cataclysm - in fiction for the sake of reading it.

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

If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.

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

I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times... So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else - they were never far from reach; they informed each other.

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