Top 60 Vikram Seth Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I think if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.”

— Vikram Seth

2. “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

3. “God save us from people who mean well.”

— Vikram Seth

4. “Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?”

— Vikram Seth

5. “Put your backbone where your wishbone is.”

— Vikram Seth

6. “I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.”

— Vikram Seth

7. “The thing about inspiration is that it takes your mind off everything else.”

— Vikram Seth

8. “Don’t put things off till it’s too late. You are the DJ of your fate.”

— Vikram Seth

9. “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

10. “Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.”

— Vikram Seth

11. “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

12. “I don’t pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.”

— Vikram Seth

13. “I think it’s possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.”

— Vikram Seth

14. “I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.”

— Vikram Seth

15. “For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.”

— Vikram Seth

16. “I want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.”

— Vikram Seth

17. “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

18. “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

19. “You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.”

— Vikram Seth

20. “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

21. “What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.”

— Vikram Seth

22. “And an equation is the same whether it’s written in red or green ink.”

— Vikram Seth

23. “I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.”

— Vikram Seth

24. “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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25. “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

26. “To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman.”

— Vikram Seth

27. “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

28. “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

29. “In spite of all temptations of belonging to many nations, I’ve remained an Indian.”

— Vikram Seth

30. “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

31. “Of course, the greater one’s need, the greater one’s propensity to be mesmerized.”

— Vikram Seth

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.”

— Vikram Seth

37. “The past is the past, and he can’t make amends, only hope that the gain will outlast the damage.”

— Vikram Seth

38. “I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.”

— Vikram Seth

39. “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.”

— Vikram Seth

40. “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

41. “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

42. “I’m not sure anyone can understand a whole life, even their own.”

— Vikram Seth

43. “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

44. “I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I’m not. I’m just obsessed with my work.”

— Vikram Seth

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “I’m not a mouse or a tigress, she thought, I’m a hedgehog.”

— Vikram Seth

50. “In the painting I saw, in the books I read, I recalled her, for she her had in many ways been the making of me.”

— Vikram Seth