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
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device – recording and projecting. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I’m from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus – on the margins of that, actually. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I don’t tackle major global events. I don’t like to read about something – an event, a cataclysm – in fiction for the sake of reading it. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I feel my writing comes from a desire to… well, it’s motivated by many things, but it’s inherently a contradiction in that I’m writing for myself, and it’s a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I think, like any artist or any writer, I just want to have that pure freedom of expression and of thought – the freedom to explore and move in unexpected ways. – 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
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
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
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
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri
It didn’t matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different. – Jhumpa Lahiri
It’s hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived. – Jhumpa Lahiri
I’m bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn’t torment or grieve me. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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. – 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
If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It’s like staring at the mirror all day. – Jhumpa Lahiri
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
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. – Jhumpa Lahiri