Jhumpa Lahiri, on fiction:

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message.

I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak.

But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

The urge to convert experience into a group of words

that are in a grammatical relation to one another

is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

It interests me to imagine characters shifting

from one situation and one location to another

for whatever the circumstances may be.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

I approach writing stories as a recorder.

I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

It is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time.

To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions.

To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on stories:

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next.

I have no other criterion.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on writing:

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

Style and personality are irrelevant.

They can be formal or casual.

They can be tall or short or fat or thin.

They can obey the rules or break them.

But they need to contain a charge.

A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jhumpa Lahiri, on books:

That's what books are for ... to travel without moving an inch.

- Jhumpa Lahiri.