#w

At 6:30, which was when the national news began, my father raised the volume and adjusted the antennas. Usually I occupied myself with a book, but that night my father insisted that I pay attention. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#attention #began #book #father #i

For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#couple #course #got #having #health

I would take up any small job on the sets, just so that I could hang around with the hope of getting noticed. ↗

— Christine Lahti

#around #could #getting #hang #hope

For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don't think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#another #corresponded #fit #four #happened

He told me he was working as an interpreter in a doctor's office in Brookline, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time, and he was translating for a doctor who had a number of Russian patients. On my way home, after running into him, I just heard this phrase in my head. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#doctor #had #head #heard #him

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#always #felt #first #had #i

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#device #i #i think #kind #projecting

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#exactly #found #how #i #just

I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#comparison #get #i #inevitable #interested

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#building #entailed #growing #growing up #had