I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
VIKRAM SETHThere are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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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 want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.
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I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.
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There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.
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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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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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The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.
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God save us from people who mean well.
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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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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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You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.
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The past is the past, and he can’t make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.
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I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
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Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
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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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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.
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God save us from people who mean well.
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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 know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
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In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I’ve remained an Indian.
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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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I think if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.
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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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I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.
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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.
VIKRAM SETH