Quotes from Vikram Seth

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unclaimed To make love with a stranger is the best. There is no riddle and there is no test. – To lie and love, not aching to make sense Of this night in the mesh of reference. To touch, unclaimed by fear of imminent day, And understand, as only strangers may. To feel the beat of foreign heart to heart Preferring neither to prolong nor part. To rest within the unknown arms and know That this is all there is; that this is so.

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

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.

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.

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

you will get what you want but you must want it and not just wish it.