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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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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
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Hasn
Stories
Novels
Seems
Grown
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Finished
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More quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

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He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera.
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Relationships do not preclude issues of morality.
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Isolation offered its own form of companionship
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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.
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Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.
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You remind me of everything that followed.
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My grandfather says that's what books are for, Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. To travel without moving an inch.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!
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I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A lot of my upbringing was about denying or fretting or evading.
Jhumpa Lahiri