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.
VIKRAM SETHGood books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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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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Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.
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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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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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I want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.
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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 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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To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
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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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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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I am certainly not allergic to causes – particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.
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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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You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.
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Don’t put things off till it’s too late. You are the DJ of your fate.
VIKRAM SETH