Vikram seth

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.

My main motivation is not to get bored. I'm just hoping I get a vaguely maverick reputation.

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

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.

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.

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

When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to...

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.

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...