Jhumpa Lahiri

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

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.

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.

They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

In Italy, where I live now, I have put some distance between myself and the world that has formed me.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.

Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying 'Listen to me'.

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

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.

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.