Vikram Seth

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Of course, a law that is selectively used is in one aspect even worse than a law that is generally used because it puts a lot of power in individuals' hands and makes government a rule, not of laws, but of people.”

“I love speculating about solutions to problems in mathematics. I have no interest whatever in sudoku. But I do look at chess and bridge problems in newspapers. I find that relaxing.”

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

“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.”

“I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.”

“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.”

“The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Basically, my mother couldn't hold a tune and when I was a baby, a rather tactless baby, I would ask her not to sing... you can't get to sleep if someone is singing off key nearby.”