Vikram Seth Quotes - Page 2

Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?

Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.

You can talk good ideas out of existence.

In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I've remained an Indian.

Of course, the greater one's need, the greater one's propensity to be mesmerized.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

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.

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.

I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

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.

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.

I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm not. I'm just obsessed with my work.

I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.

So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

Good music is good music, but it has to be good.

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.

I don't think anyone should be banned. If you don't like a book, set it aside.

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.

There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.

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.

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.

All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.

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.