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.

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.

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

I think it's the small things, the smaller episodes and details that I linger on and try to draw meaning from, just personally.

As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.

The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.

I feel very grateful for the way I was brought up. I did not realise it then, but as I grew older and started writing and realised the material that was there was very strong, I felt very grateful that my life was complicated and that my identity was never clear but put me in a position that was always questioned.

There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.

I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

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.

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

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.

Thats the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

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.

I'm from Kingston, R.I., sort of on the University of Rhode Island campus - on the margins of that, actually.

I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-awareness but also from letting go of many things. Many things that weigh us down.

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.

Isolation offered its own form of companionship.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake perhaps an embrace.

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.

Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.

One week after moving to Rome, I started writing in my diary in Italian.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling that I didn't fully belong, that my parents didn't belong.

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.

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.

Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you look at my characters as a group, they all have a different relationship with the way that places can signify emotion in them - and the way those bonds can be shattered.

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.

I have very little choice. If I don't write, I feel dreadful. So I write.

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

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.

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.

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.

I write to feel alone.

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

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.

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 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.

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 recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called 'Centuria,' which contains 100 stories, each of them about a page long. They're somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write.

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.

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.

My parents' relationship with Kolkata is so strong. Growing up, the absence of Kolkata was always present in our lives.

I feel that Italy's a country that's constantly looking out and constantly following what's happening in other cultural centers. What is being written in America, what is being published in England, what is being published in France. It's a culture that's always wanting to absorb and inform itself of other works, other writers, etc., etc.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

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.

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

I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.

Books seem so much more - much more sacred to me, and more important and essential, than they were when I was young.

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

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever.

I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.

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.

I started writing after college, slowly, secretly writing.

My father had always dreamed of getting a Ph.D., but certain life circumstances prevented him from following through. It was a tremendous, deep regret. The day I got my Ph.D., I saw in my father's face what it meant that I had done this.

I've always had this feeling wherever I go. Of not feeling fully part of things, not fully accepted, not fully inside of something.

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

Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.

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.

Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.

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.

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.

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Italians always know that I'm not Italian.

It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitant and afraid to pursue a creative life.

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.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

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.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

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

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.