Vikram Seth Quotes

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Vikram Seth

Profession : Novelist

Birth : June 20, 1952

In general, questions are fine; you can always seize upon the parts of them that interest you and concentrate on answering those. And one has to remember when answering questions that asking questions isn't easy either, and for someone who's quite shy to stand up in an audience to speak takes some courage.

Vikram Seth

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.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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 Seth

You can talk good ideas out of existence.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

My main motivation is not to get bored. I'm just hoping I get a vaguely maverick reputation.

Vikram Seth

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.

Vikram Seth

Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.

Vikram Seth

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

Vikram Seth

Of course, a law that is selectively used is in one aspect even worse than a law that is generally used because it puts a lot of power in individuals' hands and makes government a rule, not of laws, but of people.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

If I'm compelled to do something, I don't shy away from it simply because I haven't tackled it before.

Vikram Seth

Too many trees are killed to print the words of people who may not have all that much to say, and authors and journalists are equally culpable in this regard.

Vikram Seth

You get your inspiration - suggestions - wherever you have to, even from your mother.

Vikram Seth

Of course, I have to consider that I've written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.

Vikram Seth

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.

Vikram Seth