Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

When I was 17, I came to the U.S. to study Middle Eastern history and politics at Columbia University.

I was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, and I came to attend high school in Massachusetts when I was about 15 years old.

I was born in Argentina, June 13, 1943. I brought up my parents very well, so they let me come to America to study at Princeton University.

My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.

I was the first person to come into New York with a Latin American point of view which was also very much influenced by political happenings in Latin America.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

My sister lived in England for a while when I was 12, and I came to visit her, and I spent most of the time in her flat reading.

My folks met at the University of Oklahoma, in the theater department in the 1940s. They were married touring the country in 'Cinderella' and 'Snow White.' My mother was married in Cinderella's costume; the dwarves were the best men.

I can't write about NRI romances.

I went to school at the University of Rhode Island and pursued a degree in journalism, which is a little bit ironic.

When my dad came here, he came on a scholarship in the late '60s, and he went to Mississippi State. My dad is not a large man. So there's a little Taiwanese guy walking around Mississippi in, like, 1966, and I cannot imagine what that must have been like.

I was with Essien Udom in Nigeria.

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older.

Shakti' is a very loose adaptation of 'Not Without My Daughter.'

I was three years old, so I actually don't remember much of the refugee process.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

The story of my life is the Chicano experience personified.

I was watching 'Space Jam' when I was a kid but that was pretty much the only thing I knew about the NBA.

You write an autobiography because you want to tell people how you felt about a certain matter at that time.

Everyone has met or seen or interacted with a Nigerian in America because we leave Nigeria for here. We're your doctors. We're your lawyers. We're your child's best friend. All of the above.

Being an Indian in the U.S. and growing up in the suburbs were the two things that really shaped my outlook.

As we have seen in our own history, the injection of new ideas from other worlds transformed life for all, and with the establishment of new frontier communities far from the reach of the old world, new social systems also formed, more in tune with the fact that it was the individual who had to make the decisions and do the work of pioneering.

I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college.

When I was coming to this country, I heard about its promises.