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All Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes
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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
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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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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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.
Jhumpa Lahiri
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