My responsibility isn’t to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait. – Jhumpa Lahiri
Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do. – 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
There’s more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other. – Jhumpa Lahiri
Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India. – Jhumpa Lahiri
Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece – just different elements of belonging and not-belonging. – Jhumpa Lahiri
You can’t have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take risks. It’s better to do something that’s not perfect and successful every time. It’s important to be fearless and move forward, to learn from what went wrong. – 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
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 would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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. – 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
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. – 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
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for ‘The Namesake,’ I felt that it had to be a novel – it couldn’t work as a story. – 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
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
I’m the least-experimental writer. The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that’s never really interested me. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I feel as though I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t really want to set a book in any real place ever again. – Jhumpa Lahiri
Books seem so much more – much more sacred to me, and more important and essential, than they were when I was young. – Jhumpa Lahiri