All you who sleep tonight Far from the ones you love, No hand to left or right, An emptiness above– Know that you aren’t alone. The whole world shares your tears, Some for two nights or one, And some for all your years.
VIKRAM SETHEvery object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.
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Don’t put things off till it’s too late. You are the DJ of your fate.
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You will get what you want but you must want it and not just wish it.
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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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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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I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
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I think it’s possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.
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I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.
VIKRAM SETH -
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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You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.
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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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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?
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
I want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.
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For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
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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.
VIKRAM SETH -
Man without life companion is either god or beast.
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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.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.
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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.
VIKRAM SETH -
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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Dear though the reader might be, I’d be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.
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You can talk good ideas out of existence.
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To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
VIKRAM SETH -
I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
VIKRAM SETH