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

Jhumpa Lahiri

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Jhumpa Lahiri
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: July 11
Academic
Actor
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Jūmpā Lāhīrī
Nilanjana Svadeshna Lahiri
Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri
Jhumba Lahiri
Role
Approach
Recorder
Roles
Projecting
Stories
Recorders
Writing
Reporting
Kind
Device
Think
Recording
Thinking
Devices

More quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

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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
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She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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The knowledge of death seemed present in both sisters-it was something about the way they carried themselves, something that had broken too son and had not mended, marking them in spite of their lightheartedness.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold. Blindly planning for it, envisioning things that weren't the case. This was the working of the will. This was what gave the world purpose and direction. Not what was there but what was not.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Try to remember it always, he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!
Jhumpa Lahiri
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And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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Do what I will never do.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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
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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
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There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding.
Jhumpa Lahiri