Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Jhumpa Lahiri

Literary Birthday – 11 July – Jhumpa Lahiri

Happy Birthday, Jhumpa Lahiri, born on 11 July 1967.

Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

  1. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail. They remain the test, whether or not to read something.
  2. That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.
  3. There are so many ways of becoming a writer. It’s not a career track per se; it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. If I look back at my writing career, I realise that it unfolded on sort of a time release basis, and that there was an element of mystery to it. You don’t know when life will throw you something, or you will remember something. For me it wasn’t always a goal-oriented experience. It can be, but some writers develop more slowly.
  4. Go to the library. Make that a fundamental part of who you are.
  5. 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.
  6. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
  7. 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.
  8. Fiction is an act of wilfulness, a deliberate effort to reconcile, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willingfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, ‘Listen to me’.
  9. Cultivate a profound passion for reading literature. It all comes from there.

Jhumpa Lahiri is an English-born American novelist and short story writer whose work often explores the immigrant experience. Her stories examine family, arranged marriage, belonging, loneliness, and the pull between cultures. These themes reflect the challenges of living between two worlds. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. Her first novel, The Namesake, was later adapted into a film. Lahiri was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012. She received the National Humanities Medal in 2015, presented by Barack Obama. In 2022, she published Translating Myself and Others.

Source for image: librairie mollat, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jhumpa_Lahiri_(2015).png

Amanda Patterson
by Amanda Patterson
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Posted on: 11th July 2014
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