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.
VIKRAM SETHI sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
VIKRAM SETH -
Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.
VIKRAM SETH -
God save us from people who mean well.
VIKRAM SETH -
To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
VIKRAM SETH -
I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
VIKRAM SETH -
Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
VIKRAM SETH -
I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I’m not. I’m just obsessed with my work.
VIKRAM SETH