Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.

I'm a fairly undisciplined writer.

I've always written in a free, unencumbered way.

As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you.

There's a certain freedom in writing when you don't know if you'll ever have an audience.

There's a great freedom in writing by yourself. You can write anything you want.

The experience of writing under a pseudonym was tremendously liberating; I could write what I wanted.

Bad writing as a conscious goal is liberating for students: They are freed to be creative in a new and different way.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

'Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.

You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

I am the freest author in the world.

While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.

I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation.

I try and write the way things happen. I don't try and fulfill people's wishes.

Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.

I just write books, and I do it without any notion of what I should do or shouldn't do.

The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'

I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like.

I do not write for an audience.