Vikram Seth Quotes

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

Vikram Seth

#2. The past is the past, and he can't make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.

Vikram Seth

#3. 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 Seth

#4. I'm not a mouse or a tigress, she thought, I'm a hedgehog.

Vikram Seth

#5. Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.

Vikram Seth

#6. Put your backbone where your wishbone is.

Vikram Seth

#7. Oh, no said her mother sadly. You know nothing of the pettiness of women. When brothers agree to split a joint family they sometimes divide lakhs of rupees worth of property in a few minutes. But the tussle of their wives over the pots and pans in the common kitchen
that nearly causes bloodshed.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#10. 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

#11. 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.

Vikram Seth

#12. God save us from people who mean well.

Vikram Seth

#13. 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

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

Vikram Seth

#15. It is exciting to write about the present once one gets beyond the trivia of the moment. As a time to live in, as a time to think about, the present is intriguing.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#17. If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

Vikram Seth

#18. I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

Vikram Seth

#19. 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

#20. If you were to ask me to pick my favourite author, well, there are so many of them, I'd really just have to say the first names that came to mind, and I'm sure that I'll later think 'Oh, I should have mentioned that one.'

Vikram Seth

#21. Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored

Vikram Seth

#22. 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.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#24. And sometimes both of them forgot that what they were undergoing amid the clink of cutlery and crockery was a mutual interview that might decide whether or not they would own a common set of those items some time in the whimsical future.

Vikram Seth

#25. Each point in the universe must make up its own mind on the question of acknowledgement before acknowledgement can be considered universal.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#27. The problem with too beautiful a view is that it's alright for the mulling stage. But for the writing stage, you want to be somewhere without a view, especially if it is very different from what you're writing.

Vikram Seth

#28. 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

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#31. Basically, my mother couldn't hold a tune and when I was a baby, a rather tactless baby, I would ask her not to sing ... you can't get to sleep if someone is singing off key nearby.

Vikram Seth

#32. Wherever his faltering mind,
unsteadily wanders,
he should restrain it
and bring it under self-control
Krishna, the mind is faltering,
violent, strong, and stubborn;
I find it as difficult
to hold as the wind.

Vikram Seth

#33. 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.

Vikram Seth

#34. Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#37. Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

Vikram Seth

#38. He had come to a decision about the next step in his life. This decision was irrevocable unless he changed his mind.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#41. I love speculating about solutions to problems in mathematics. I have no interest whatever in sudoku. But I do look at chess and bridge problems in newspapers. I find that relaxing.

Vikram Seth

#42. You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

Vikram Seth

#43. Voices
Voices in my head,
Chanting, 'Kisses. Bread.
Prove yourself. Fight. Shove.
Learn. Earn. Look for love',
Drown a lesser voice,
Silent now of choice:
'Breathe in peace, and be
Still, for once, like me'.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#45. 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.

Vikram Seth

#46. In the painting I saw, in the books I read, I recalled her, for she her had in many ways been the making of me.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#48. May we not be as foolish as we are almost bound to be. If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred. May we see that we could have been born as each other. May we, in short, believe in humane logic and perhaps, in due course, love.

Vikram Seth

#49. 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.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#51. Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her - the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.

Vikram Seth

#52. 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

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

Vikram Seth

#54. I don't read as much as people may expect. In fact, sometimes I feel that I should probably read more, but then I do believe that one of the big problems of our times is that there's too much reading and not enough thinking.

Vikram Seth

#55. 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.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#57. 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 Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#59. To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#61. 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

#62. On the whole, I don't like reading long books. I'm not a fan of 'Ulysses.' And I haven't quite finished 'War and Peace.'

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#65. Perhaps it is true that for all the evidence of the mirror, one pictures oneself in some deep niche of the mind as forever 18.

Vikram Seth

#66. Strange to be a man and never grow big with child. To feel a part of you opening, and a part of you leaving, and howling as if it were not a part of you.

Vikram Seth

#67. 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.

Vikram Seth

#68. I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.

Vikram Seth

#69. You will get what you want but you must want it and not just wish it.

Vikram Seth

#70. The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#72. 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.

Vikram Seth

#73. As for what I listen to after writing, it could be anything - but I've noticed that if the current book contains music from one tradition, it is music from another tradition that most relaxes me.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#75. 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

#76. Realism hasn't fallen out of favor with most people, who are interested in people's lives rather than gymnastics of style or literary trends. It's a certain kind of academic who undervalues realism, largely because it is not amenable to endless exegesis.

Vikram Seth

#77. In a clear brook
With joyful haste
The whimsical trout
Shot past me like an arrow
I play the line of the song, I play the leaps and plunges of the right hand of the piano, I am the trout, the angler, the brook, the observer.

Vikram Seth

#78. I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your approval; nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that those whom I have sent off alive and free will again bear arms against me; for there is nothing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself, and they like themselves.

Vikram Seth

#79. Night Watch
Awake for hours and staring at the ceiling
Through the unsettled stillness of the night
He grows possessed of the obsessive feeling
That dawn has come and gone and brought no light.

Vikram Seth

#80. ghazal that he had heard Saeeda Bai sing, but, oddly,

Vikram Seth

#81. I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#83. Do not write if there is no tremendous urge to do so. At the heart, there must be an inspiration or muse or one of those old-fashioned things. Else, why bore yourself, destroy other people's interest and kill trees?

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#86. The ifs and buts of history ... form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

Vikram Seth

#87. Man without life companion is either god or beast.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#90. 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?

Vikram Seth

#91. 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.

Vikram Seth

#92. 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

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

Vikram Seth

#94. 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.

Vikram Seth

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

Vikram Seth

#96. When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. Those were painful years - painful then and painful to look back on.

Vikram Seth

#97. You can talk good ideas out of existence.

Vikram Seth