Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing

Here's Jhumpa Lahiri in the New York Times blog writing about her writing and what makes her writing so special. Here she speaks of underlining sentences she likes in famous writers' passages. I remember that's precisely what I did when I read "Interpreter of Maladies."

"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. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response. Most days begin with sentences that are typed into a journal no one has ever seen. There is a freedom to this; freedom to write what I will not proceed to wrestle with. The entries are mostly quotidian, a warming up of the fingers and brain. On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again."

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