I think if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.
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
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You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.
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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.
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In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I’ve remained an Indian.
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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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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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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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Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.
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I am certainly not allergic to causes – particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.
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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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For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
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I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
VIKRAM SETH -
To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
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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 -
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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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.
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So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
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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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I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
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God save us from people who mean well.
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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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And an equation is the same whether it’s written in red or green ink.
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I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
VIKRAM SETH -
God save us from people who mean well.
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Put your backbone where your wishbone is.
VIKRAM SETH -
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 -
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 SETH