Vikram Seth Quotes

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.

Put your backbone where your wishbone is.

Don't put things off till it's too late. You are the DJ of your fate.

I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.

Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.

It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.

What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.

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.

For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.

Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person's power. Be just to yourself.

And an equation is the same whether it's written in red or green ink

Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.

I think if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.

I'm not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.

In life's brief game to be a winner A man must have...oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love.

To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.

I think it's possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.

God save us from people who mean well.

I certainly think its very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them.

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.

I am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.

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.

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.