Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Profession : Author

Birth : July 11, 1967

Books seem so much more - much more sacred to me, and more important and essential, than they were when I was young.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.

Jhumpa Lahiri

One week after moving to Rome, I started writing in my diary in Italian.

Jhumpa Lahiri

If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that places can signify emotion in them - and the way those bonds can be shattered.

Jhumpa Lahiri

It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.

Jhumpa Lahiri

My father had always dreamed of getting a Ph.D., but certain life circumstances prevented him from following through. It was a tremendous, deep regret. The day I got my Ph.D., I saw in my father's face what it meant that I had done this.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing.

Jhumpa Lahiri

On the technical side, I hope that my writing is evolving and maturing, ripening, deepening.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Sometimes, so much of the difficulty is the question of 'What am I going to write about?' because the world is so vast.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going to happen, and the pace. But I think if I stop to think about it in an abstract sense, I feel very daunted. I just try to enter into the story and feel my way through it. It's a very murky, intuitive way of going about it.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language.

Jhumpa Lahiri

When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively.

Jhumpa Lahiri

My father encouraged me to work in the library, just because it was the world that he knew. But I also wanted to do it. I also wanted to work in the library and be part of the library somehow, because it represented a world that really wasn't represented in my home, and I wanted it to be.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Literature is such a profound and deep way to look into someone else's life, his mind, his hopes and thoughts. Books have opened so many doors for me, taking me to places where my normal life and its finite limits could never have.

Jhumpa Lahiri

In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.

Jhumpa Lahiri