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.
VIKRAM SETHFiction 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.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.
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I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.
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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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To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
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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.
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It’s not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.
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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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Man without life companion is either god or beast.
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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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You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
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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 often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
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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 need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.
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The past is the past, and he can’t make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.
VIKRAM SETH