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
imagination music-love competent
I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
writing listening-to-music bother
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.
book writing successful
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.
amount certain less pressure rather talk
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.
thinking persons
Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person's power. Be just to yourself.
book reading rooms
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.
thinking world goodness
I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.
character frustration peculiar
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.
book want obscure
I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.
thinking tree rooted
I think it's possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.
men games winner
In life's brief game to be a winner A man must have...oh yes, above All else, of course, someone to love.
thinking important matter
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.
stars journey doors
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.
jobs giving-up writing
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.