You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally – your ears will know.
And an equation is the same whether it’s written in red or green ink.
Is it not love that knows how to make smooth things rough and rough things smooth?
For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.
I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.
I just love music – by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.
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.
I need my natural laziness to be counteracted by obsession in order to do anything.
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
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 think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.
It’s not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.
I want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.
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.
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.
Dear though the reader might be, I’d be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.