Vikram Seth Quotes

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

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.

Don't put things off till it's too late. You are the DJ of your fate.

Put your backbone where your wishbone is.

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.

The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

In life's brief game to be a winner A man must have...oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love.

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

Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?

Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.

Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person's power. Be just to yourself.

I don't think anyone should be banned. If you don't like a book, set it aside.

God save us from people who mean well.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.

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

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.

Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

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 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.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

You can talk good ideas out of existence.

I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.

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