Vikram Seth Quotes & Sayings

In a clear brook
With joyful haste
The whimsical trout
Shot past me like an arrow
I play the line of the song, I play the leaps and plunges of the right hand of the piano, I am the trout, the angler, the brook, the observer. — Vikram Seth

They go to work, attend a meeting
Write an equation, have a beer,
Hail colleagues with a cheerful greeting,
Are conscientious, sane and sincere,
Rational, able and fastidious.
Through hardened casing no invidious
Tapeworm of doubt, no guilt, no qualm,
Pierces to Sabotage their claim.
When something's technically attractive,
You follow the conception through,
That's all. What if you leave a slew
Of living dead, of radioactive
"Collateral damage" in its wake?
It's just a job, for heaven's sake. — Vikram Seth

You can talk good ideas out of existence. — Vikram Seth

Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her - the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world. — Vikram Seth

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

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

In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I've remained an Indian. — Vikram Seth

Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything. — Vikram Seth

God save us from people who mean well. — Vikram Seth

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

I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge. — Vikram Seth

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.' — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me. — Vikram Seth

Man without life companion is either god or beast. — Vikram Seth

All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca. — Vikram Seth

Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth? — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored — Vikram Seth

I'm actually a very lazy person. Most of the time, I'm happy to sit around and stare. Or watch bad TV soaps. It's quite rare for me to get inspired by anything, but it could be something small. A view of the Serpentine. A snatch of music. Or a little shred of conversation overheard on a bus, such as, 'You also will marry someone of my choice.' — Vikram Seth

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

I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature. — Vikram Seth

Life is not easy for anyone here. Loss and fear, failure and disappointment, pain and ill-health, doubt and death-even those who have escaped from poverty have no escape from these. What makes life bearable is love-to love, to be loved, and-even after death or parting-to know that you have loved and been loved. — Vikram Seth

In life's brief game to be a winner
A man must have ... oh yes, above
All else, of course, someone to love. — Vikram Seth

If I'm compelled to do something, I don't shy away from it simply because I haven't tackled it before. — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

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

A Word Of Thanks
To these I know a debt past telling:
My several muses, harsh and kind;
My folks, who stood my sulks and yelling,
And (in the long run) did not mind;
Dead legislators, whose orations
I've filched to mix my own potations;
Indeed, all those whose brains I've pressed,
Unmerciful, because obsessed;
My own dumb soul, which on a pittance
Survived to weave this fictive spell;
And, gentle reader, you as well,
The fountainhead of all remittance.
Buy me before good sense insists
You'll strain your purse and sprain your wrists. — Vikram Seth

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

It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here. — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your approval; nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that those whom I have sent off alive and free will again bear arms against me; for there is nothing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself, and they like themselves. — Vikram Seth

Well, what do you think? Avanti?"
"Avanti," cries everyone, and, after a few quick re-tunings of our instruments, and re-initialisings of our hearts, we enter the slow theme-and-variations movement.
How good it is to pay this quintet, to play it, not to work at it - to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of recreation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight. — Vikram Seth

Oh, no said her mother sadly. You know nothing of the pettiness of women. When brothers agree to split a joint family they sometimes divide lakhs of rupees worth of property in a few minutes. But the tussle of their wives over the pots and pans in the common kitchen
that nearly causes bloodshed. — Vikram Seth

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

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 for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch. — Vikram Seth

For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline. — Vikram Seth

I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent. — Vikram Seth

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

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

What I mean is,' continued Amit, 'it sprouts, and grows, and spreads, and drops down branches that become trunks or intertwine with other branches. Sometimes branches die. Sometimes the main trunk dies, and the structure is held up by the supporting trunks. When you go to the Botanical Garden you'll see what I mean. It has its own life - but so do the snakes and birds and bees and lizards and termites that live in it and on it and off it. But then it's also like the Ganges in its upper, middle and lower courses - including its delta - of course. — Vikram Seth

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books. — Vikram Seth

Don't put things off till it's too late. You are the DJ of your fate. — Vikram Seth

Voices
Voices in my head,
Chanting, 'Kisses. Bread.
Prove yourself. Fight. Shove.
Learn. Earn. Look for love',
Drown a lesser voice,
Silent now of choice:
'Breathe in peace, and be
Still, for once, like me'. — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

I'm not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own. — Vikram Seth

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.' — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias. — Vikram Seth

How rarely these few years, as work keeps up aloof,
Or fares, or one thing or another,
How we had days to spend under our parents' roof;
Myself, my sister, and my brother.
All five of us will die; to reckon from the past
This flesh and blood is unforgiving.
What's hard is that just one of us will be the last
To bear it all and go on living. — Vikram Seth

Good music is good music, but it has to be good. — Vikram Seth

Each point in the universe must make up its own mind on the question of acknowledgement before acknowledgement can be considered universal. — Vikram Seth

You get your inspiration - suggestions - wherever you have to, even from your mother. — Vikram Seth

Put your backbone where your wishbone is. — Vikram Seth

I'm not a mouse or a tigress, she thought, I'm a hedgehog. — Vikram Seth

What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go. — Vikram Seth

Perhaps it is true that for all the evidence of the mirror, one pictures oneself in some deep niche of the mind as forever 18. — Vikram Seth

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

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

She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena's love of music, Pran's asthma, Maan's generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve quilts stored in the great zinc trunks of Prem Nivas, the moulting feather of some pond-heron, a small unrung brass bell, the memory of decency in an indecent time, the temperament of Bhaskar's great-grandchildren. Indeed, for all the Minsisster of Revenue's impatience with her, she was his regret.
And it was right that she should continue to be so, for he should have treated her better while she lived, the poor, ignorant, grieving fool. — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

I don't think anyone should be banned. If you don't like a book, set it aside. — Vikram Seth

The ifs and buts of history ... form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet. — Vikram Seth

Night Watch
Awake for hours and staring at the ceiling
Through the unsettled stillness of the night
He grows possessed of the obsessive feeling
That dawn has come and gone and brought no light. — Vikram Seth

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

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

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

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. — Vikram Seth

Basically, my mother couldn't hold a tune and when I was a baby, a rather tactless baby, I would ask her not to sing ... you can't get to sleep if someone is singing off key nearby. — Vikram Seth

I am careful about fiction. A novel is not a tract or an essay. If I want to write about land reforms, or Hindu-Muslim relations, or position of women, I can do it as it affects my characters as in 'A Suitable Boy.' I could only write about issues specifically through essays. But I'll do that only if I have something worthwhile to say. — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

My main motivation is not to get bored. I'm just hoping I get a vaguely maverick reputation. — Vikram Seth

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

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

I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure. — Vikram Seth

When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. Those were painful years - painful then and painful to look back on. — Vikram Seth

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 necessarily to find your voice, which grinds out the same sort of thing again and again, but to find a vehicle for people who are far more important than the author: the characters. — Vikram Seth

Wherever his faltering mind,
unsteadily wanders,
he should restrain it
and bring it under self-control
Krishna, the mind is faltering,
violent, strong, and stubborn;
I find it as difficult
to hold as the wind. — Vikram Seth

My eyes close. I am here and not here. A waking nap? A flight to the end of the galaxy and perhaps a couple of billion light-years beyond? — Vikram Seth

ghazal that he had heard Saeeda Bai sing, but, oddly, — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

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. — Vikram Seth

And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one's son and that one's nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.'
Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it. — Vikram Seth

I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm not. I'm just obsessed with my work. — Vikram Seth

I certainly think it's very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them. — Vikram Seth

May we not be as foolish as we are almost bound to be. If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred. May we see that we could have been born as each other. May we, in short, believe in humane logic and perhaps, in due course, love. — Vikram Seth

He had come to a decision about the next step in his life. This decision was irrevocable unless he changed his mind. — Vikram Seth

I am certainly not allergic to causes - particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance. — Vikram Seth

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

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. — Vikram Seth

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only. — Vikram Seth

And sometimes both of them forgot that what they were undergoing amid the clink of cutlery and crockery was a mutual interview that might decide whether or not they would own a common set of those items some time in the whimsical future. — Vikram Seth

I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat ... and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax. — Vikram Seth

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

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

I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.
Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus. — Vikram Seth

You will get what you want but you must want it and not just wish it. — Vikram Seth

I think if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well. — Vikram Seth

The problem with too beautiful a view is that it's alright for the mulling stage. But for the writing stage, you want to be somewhere without a view, especially if it is very different from what you're writing. — Vikram Seth