Top 55 Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

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

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

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.

Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I’m also more exposed.

I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I’m writing in it now as well as reading it. It is so interesting delving further into language.

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

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.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

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.

In Italy, where I live now, I have put some distance between myself and the world that has formed me.

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

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.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don’t know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents’ marriage. And it’s interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.

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.

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.

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, ‘My great-grandparents came from wherever… this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.’ All the details get watered down but don’t quite disappear.

I’ve seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn’t occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don’t feel like going back and dredging them up.

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.

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.

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

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.

They’ve lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here… It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don’t think either of them will ever consciously think, ‘I am an American.’

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.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did… used to come to my parents’ house in 1971 from Bangladesh. He was at the University of Rhode Island. And I was four, four years old, at the time, and so I actually don’t have any memories of this gentleman.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

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.

For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems – but I knew she wanted to be married.

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.

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.

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

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

My responsibility isn’t to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.

In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.

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.

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.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

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.

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

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.

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

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece – just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

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

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.