Vikram Seth
Do not write if there is no tremendous urge to do so. At the heart, there must be an inspiration or muse or one of those old-fashioned things. Else, why bore yourself, destroy other people's interest and kill trees?
I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.
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.
You can talk good ideas out of existence.
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.
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.
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 time to think about, the present is intriguing.
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.
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.
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Hate
Put your backbone where your wishbone is.Collection: Faith
Don't put things off till it's too late. You are the DJ of your fate.Collection: Fate
Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village in this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that leave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable.Collection: Stars
It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.Collection: Heart
What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.Collection: Differences
Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.Collection: Writing
For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Love
And an equation is the same whether it's written in red or green inkCollection: Ink
Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person's power. Be just to yourself.Collection: Thinking
To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.Collection: Love Is
God save us from people who mean well.Collection: Mean
I certainly think its very important that writers as citizens - not necessarily as writers, but just as ordinary citizens - should talk about things that matter to them.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Blessed
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.Collection: Prayer
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?Collection: Couple
Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?Collection: Smooth
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.Collection: Book
Of course, the greater one's need, the greater one's propensity to be mesmerized.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Book
I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Race