Top 30 Vikram Seth Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.’

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!

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.