Vikram Seth Quotes

You get your inspiration - suggestions - wherever you have to, even from your mother.

I certainly think its very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them.

All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.

I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.

All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right, An emptiness above-- Know that you aren't alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all your years.

In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I've remained an Indian.

Of course, the greater one's need, the greater one's propensity to be mesmerized.

And an equation is the same whether it's written in red or green ink

My eyes close. I am here and not here. A waking nap? A flight to the end of the galaxy and perhaps a couple of billion light-years beyond?

I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm not. I'm just obsessed with my work.

What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.

I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.

It is exciting to write about the present once one gets beyond the trivia of the moment. As a time to live in, as a time to think about, the present is intriguing.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know.

God save us from people who mean well.

For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.

I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.

I simply seem to drift. But I sort of allow the drift, because it has a kind of check - it forces me to work harder at what I'm interested in.

I am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.

I'm not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.

To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

I rarely listen to music while writing. If I don't like it, it bothers me, and if I like it, it absorbs me so much I can't write.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

I tend to follow a scattershot approach to reading a lot of very diverse subjects interest me, and I'm quite happy to read stuff on any of them.

Put your backbone where your wishbone is.

Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.

In general, questions are fine; you can always seize upon the parts of them that interest you and concentrate on answering those. And one has to remember when answering questions that asking questions isn't easy either, and for someone who's quite shy to stand up in an audience to speak takes some courage.

Good music is good music, but it has to be good.

Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.

I don't think people give Indian society enough credit. We may not like to talk much about things but we do, basically, want to live and let live.

I think it's possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

I think if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.

Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.