American - Author | July 11, 1967 -
The highlight of my undergraduate years was a year-long Shakespeare course I took with Edward Tayler.
Jhumpa Lahiri
YearsCourseShakespeareHighlight
Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.
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I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing.
WritingBookWantNeverDealOnce
Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.
WritingBookStoryYouWayNever
When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.
LifeWordsMeBookBackWay
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
LiveSpeakLanguageFeelYouSecret
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.
MyselfMeMysteryWhyWriteOutside
I write to feel alone.
AloneFeelWriteI Write
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.
LanguageWishNewKindDesperation
I feel my writing comes from a desire to... well, it's motivated by many things, but it's inherently a contradiction in that I'm writing for myself, and it's a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect.
JourneyMyselfWritingFeelDesire
I feel that Italy's a country that's constantly looking out and constantly following what's happening in other cultural centers. What is being written in America, what is being published in England, what is being published in France. It's a culture that's always wanting to absorb and inform itself of other works, other writers, etc., etc.
CultureLookingFeelAmericaCountry
I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.
FictionReadItalianTendMostly
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