Quotes from Jhumpa Lahiri

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

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.

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 think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person.

So much of my writing derives from these questions that I ask myself - things that are utterly beyond my personal set of experiences - and it's my attempt to try to... understand, to sort of break out of my own consciousness, you know, the limitations of my own life.

With 'Interpreter,' I didn't know it was ever going to be a book, that they were going to be published. I was writing them in a vacuum for the most part. They were my apprentice work. Then the stories happened to become a book.

When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment.

I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going to happen, and the pace. But I think if I stop to think about it in an abstract sense, I feel very daunted. I just try to enter into the story and feel my way through it. It's a very murky, intuitive way of going about it.

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

Sometimes, so much of the difficulty is the question of 'What am I going to write about?' because the world is so vast.

She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.

That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the life, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. Your breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.

Is that what you think of when you think of me? Gogol asks him. Do I remind you of that night? Not at all, his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. You remind me of everything that followed.

Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

She supposed that all those years of loving a person who was dishonest had taught her a few things.

On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.

Remember it always. Remember that you and I made this journey and went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.

Books are the best means—private, discreet, reliable—of overcoming reality.

It was only then, raising my water glass in his name, that I knew what it meant to miss someone who was so many miles and hours away, just as he had missed his wife and daughters for so many months.

Solitude: it's become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it's a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.