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"This story is based on a gentleman who indeed did... used to come to my parents' house in 1971 from Bangladesh. He was at the University of Rhode Island. And I was four, four years old, at the time, and so I actually don't have any memories of this gentleman."
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"You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time."

"If you really think about it, when watching television, you have product placement all the time."

"Time is standing still. We are measuring ourselves by how far we are going."

"There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do."
Explore more quotes by Jhumpa Lahiri

"You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I've realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn't feel a part of any tradition. I think that would have been too overwhelming, in a sense."

"I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories."

"It's easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories."

"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."

"I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now."

"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."

"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."

"Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story."

"Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians."

"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."
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