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 SETHFiction 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.
More Vikram Seth Quotes
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Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
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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 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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Don’t put things off till it’s too late. You are the DJ of your fate.
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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.
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I want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.
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I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
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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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Dear though the reader might be, I’d be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.
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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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The past is the past, and he can’t make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.
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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.
VIKRAM SETH






