So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
VIKRAM SETHThe past is the past, and he can’t make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
-
-
You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.
VIKRAM SETH -
I think if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.
VIKRAM SETH -
It’s not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.
VIKRAM SETH -
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 -
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 -
I simply seem to drift. But I sort of allow the drift, because it has a kind of check – it forces me to work harder at what I’m interested in.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
I don’t pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
It is exciting to write about the present once one gets beyond the trivia of the moment. As a time to live in, as a time to think about, the present is intriguing.
VIKRAM SETH -
I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.
VIKRAM SETH -
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.
VIKRAM SETH -
Dear though the reader might be, I’d be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.
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 -
I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
VIKRAM SETH