Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.

Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

If you can talk, you can write.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

Words are my life.

I was always writing. I've always been attracted to words and stories, communication.

I grew up with a love of words.

Stories that can be told through language and words don't need to be filmed.

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

I'm writing, I'm using language, I'm using that language to tell stories and even more so to get ideas across. And I just love that, and I've always loved that.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I knew that I had to write my memoirs.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

Writing is my primary way of expressing myself.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

Good dialogue is very important.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.