Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

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.

I don't discuss my own beliefs in public, but I will say the beliefs I've given my characters do not necessarily represent what I myself believe.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

The minute I ever start thinking about what a character would do is the minute I bring my ego into play. It's the minute I'm putting a judgment on something.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

When I'm writing fiction, I'm sort of interested by the fact that somehow or other I can have the feeling of actually seeing things through someone else's eyes.

Every time I create a character, I don't assume they speak like I do, even if they're Australian.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

Especially when I write, I want to get out of people's heads and have them speak and have them get dressed and have them go to work.

Part of me becomes the characters I'm writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.

I very seldom, very seldom, even know what my characters look like.

There's no point in using someone else's characters if you're going to turn them into your own vision. You have to be loyal to that person's worldview and sensitive to what they would and wouldn't have done with their characters, and how explicit or inexplicit they would've been.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

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.

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

I need to have some depth in my characters. That's why they are all Bengalis. I can't imagine writing a book with someone called Saxena as the hero.

The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.