Jhumpa Lahiri

“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.”

“The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.”

“They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'”

“I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.”

“I write about characters that interest me. And I don't think of my books as being forms of entertainment.”

“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.”

“My responsibility isn't to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.”

“I love Rome. I'm very happy there. I wasn't in New York.”

“Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.”

“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.”

“Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.”

“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.”

“I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times... So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else - they were never far from reach; they informed each other.”

“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.”

“...American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.”

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

“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”

“I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.”

“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.”

“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.”