Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

Any experience that isn't fun is probably something I will at least use in my writing someday.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

I've got more ideas for books than I'll ever be able to use in my lifetime. I'm very fortunate like that.

I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

I believe that it's an author's job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should - and I think it's inescapable that it will - inform your work. I'm all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner.

I don't know how I do it, but I've written about everything. I've written about my shoes.

So many wonderful books to write, and not enough hours in the day. An embarrassment of riches.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

The dull externals of the screenwriter's working life are well known: We are the people taking up too much table space at cafes.

I don't believe in writer's block. I'll get stuck, but being stuck, I'll still write a verse. If you know where you're going, you can always start from there and work your way back.

I love writing to my little sister. It's a very nice, easy kind of way I always find inspiration.

I think it was Fran Lebowitz who said that there are no writing prodigies. You have to have something to write about.

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

I write characters that are based on elements of people I know and experiences I've really had.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

If you want to write, keep cats.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

I wish I was one of those people who could write script after script and pages and pages. I can only aspire to do that.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.