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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

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Vikram Seth
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 20
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Calcutta
Happens
Form
Going
Gossip
People
Enter
Basically
Fiction
Happen
Lives

More quotes by Vikram Seth

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The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.
Vikram Seth
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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
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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
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Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
Vikram Seth
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I'm not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.
Vikram Seth
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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
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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
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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
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And an equation is the same whether it's written in red or green ink
Vikram Seth
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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
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I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.
Vikram Seth
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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
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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
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I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm not. I'm just obsessed with my work.
Vikram Seth
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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
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Good music is good music, but it has to be good.
Vikram Seth
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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
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I am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.
Vikram Seth
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I think if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.
Vikram Seth
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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