Vikram Seth Quotes

59 quotes in 888 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• God save us from people who mean well.
• 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…
• Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
• What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.
• It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.
• I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
• 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,…
• 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 thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.
• The fact is that at different stages of your life, and under the influence of different inspirations, you write different things. The point is not…
• There are plenty of good Indian writers in English, and none of us feel we are carrying the burden of being a poster boy.
• 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…
• 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…
• So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

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