Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Titles either come to you at the beginning or they don't come to you at all, I find, and I hate the feeling that I haven't got a title because it usually means that you are left at the end scrambling around trying to find something.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.

I have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

I've never dreamed of a story idea. I have such boring dreams.

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

One handy piece of equipment, which I recommend to any writer of fiction, is a set of Myriorama cards. I consult them frequently.

I'm pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, 'Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?' I'll jot the idea down. Then I'm like, 'All right, so now that it's a zoo, that penguin's loose,' or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

I sort of love reading the scripts and going, 'Oh wow, what a great idea. I never would have thought of that.'

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

Blank paper has always inspired me.