Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

• That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

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• 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

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• A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.

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

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• 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

• 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.

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Jhumpa Lahiri

• 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

• 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

Jhumpa Lahiri (23)

Birth:	11th July, 1967
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London, England. She is an English-born American novelist, short story writer and professor. She earned a BA degree in English Literature from Barnard College in 1989. She earned three master’s degrees an MA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, an MA in Comparative Literature, and a PhD in Renaissance Studies from Boston University. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She has written several novels include: The Namesake, and The Lowland (Nominations: Booker Prize, National Book Award for Fiction. Won- DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2014). She has written several short stories include: Interpreter of Maladies (Won- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2000, O. Henry Award for short story 1999, and PEN/Hemingway Award for best Fiction 1999), Unaccustomed Earth (Won- Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2008, Asian American Literary Award 2009), and One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories (with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). She awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama on September 10, 2015.

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