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 SETHFor a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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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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To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
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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.
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You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
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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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Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.
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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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You will get what you want but you must want it and not just wish it.
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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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I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
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I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.
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I’m not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.
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God save us from people who mean well.
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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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God save us from people who mean well.
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Put your backbone where your wishbone is.
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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.
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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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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 have a reputation for being hermitlike. I’m not. I’m just obsessed with my work.
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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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You can talk good ideas out of existence.
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In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I’ve remained an Indian.
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I don’t think people give Indian society enough credit. We may not like to talk much about things but we do, basically, want to live and let live.
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I am certainly not allergic to causes – particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.
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Man without life companion is either god or beast.
VIKRAM SETH