Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes
"On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Safety, Trees)
"Relationships do not preclude issues of morality."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Morality, Relationships)
"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."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Experience, May, Will)
"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
(Related: People, Sense, Tradition, Writing)
"The reactions haven't differed; the concerns have been different. When I read for a predominantly Indian audience, there are more questions that are based on issues of identity and representation."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Identity, Questions)
"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
(Related: Home, Time, Living, Office, Running)
"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
(Related: Idea, Writing)
"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
(Related: Names)
"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."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Time, Gentleman, Memories, Old, Parents, University, Years)
"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."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
"I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Computers, Life, People, Internet, Now, Right, Want)
"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
(Related: Life, Time, Building, Growing up, Loss, Parents, Sense, states, United)
"I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Reading, Right, Writing)
"For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Thought, Years)
"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."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Health, Problems, Woman)
"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
(Related: Father, Attention, News, Night)
"I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Time, First)
"Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Thought)