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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

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Vikram Seth
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 20
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Calcutta
Learn
Iambic
Comes
Stanza
Matter
Constitutes
Way
Naturally
Things
Basically
Ears
Poetry
Along

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I think it's possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.
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Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
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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.
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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.
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To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.
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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.
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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.
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I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.
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The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.
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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.
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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.
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I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.
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God save us from people who mean well.
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I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.
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Of course, the greater one's need, the greater one's propensity to be mesmerized.
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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.
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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.
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In life's brief game to be a winner A man must have...oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love.
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You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
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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.
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