Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth
Vikram Seth CBEis an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has received several awards including Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 June 1952
CountryIndia
humorous thinking stories
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.
gossip people fiction
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.
writing boredom stronger
Boredom provides a stronger inclination to write than anything.
asking-questions shy answering-questions
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.
writing thinking trivia
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.
silly might dear
Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.
prayer moving iron
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.
music-is be-good
Good music is good music, but it has to be good.
dream drinking california
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.
force ought
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.
affects careful characters issues land novel position tract women worthwhile
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.
hundred inch shallow somebody whereas writes
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.
concerned far impulse main point sure tends writer writers
The point really is that a writer tends to write a book that he or she tends to write. It's as simple as that. Of course, it's important to make a living and all that, but the main impulse as far as I'm concerned - and I'm sure as other writers are concerned - is to tell a story that I feel impelled by.
alright somewhere
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.