I think it’s possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.
VIKRAM SETHIn 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.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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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?
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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.
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I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
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Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.
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Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.
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I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.
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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.
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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.
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God save us from people who mean well.
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You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
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You will get what you want but you must want it and not just wish it.
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I think if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.
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Dear though the reader might be, I’d be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I’m not. I’m just obsessed with my work.
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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.
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I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
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In life’s brief game to be a winner A man must have; oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love.
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What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.
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Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.
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You can talk good ideas out of existence.
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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.
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Man without life companion is either god or beast.
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Don’t put things off till it’s too late. You are the DJ of your fate.
VIKRAM SETH