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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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Vikram Seth
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 20
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Calcutta
Listen
Write
Music
Writing
Much
Absorbs
Like
Bothers
Rarely
Bother

More quotes by 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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For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
Vikram Seth
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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
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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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Good music is good music, but it has to be good.
Vikram Seth
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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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Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
Vikram Seth
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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
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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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You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
Vikram Seth
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I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
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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To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
Vikram Seth
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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
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I think it's possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.
Vikram Seth
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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
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I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
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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I don't think anyone should be banned. If you don't like a book, set it aside.
Vikram Seth
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You can talk good ideas out of existence.
Vikram Seth