Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.
VIKRAM SETHI 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.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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God save us from people who mean well.
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I’m not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.
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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.
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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.
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Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
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Put your backbone where your wishbone is.
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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 need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.
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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.
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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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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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Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.
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You can talk good ideas out of existence.
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For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
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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