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 SETHFor a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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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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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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To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
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Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.
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The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.
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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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Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
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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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Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.
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I don’t pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.
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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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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.
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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 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 -
Put your backbone where your wishbone is.
VIKRAM SETH