Vikram Seth Quotes

By the age of three ... I was already an addicted reader. I still crave daily immersion in experience other than my own; (it needn't be more pleasant, exciting or illuminating -- merely other) and I still fall into books as though into catalepsy.

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.

I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading, my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure, I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

People who fall in love with books never really stop falling.

There's so many good books, but I'm always like, "I'm sorry, I have five more Faulkners to read, I can't be bothered." Most of the time when you try, you fall on the wrong one.

I suppose I could read more fiction, but I haven't moved in that direction. I'd like more time even though I spend six hours a day reading. People say their eyes get tired, but I've never experienced that. In college I used to read 10 hours a day. My wife says I'm obsessive compulsive. She might have a point because when I was an undergrad student we had the required reading list and the suggested reading list. I always read all the suggested reading too.

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.

They say nobody has the attention span to read great books early in life. If I start to read something good, I'll look and it's 86 pages already. Attention span. What are they talking about? If it's good, it'll drag you in.

She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life that life itself. When I was in the middle of 'Red Storm Rising' by Tom Clancy - which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist - you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn't have noticed.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.

I read constantly. If I don't have a good book, I'm beside myself.

I read some books that were the right books for me. I read them and I didn't even notice turning the pages anymore. I thought, "That's what I want to do with my life."

I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?

I read a lot, that's my main hobby. I've got an iPad which I store books on and I read voraciously. I'm a slow reader but I'm obsessive. I make references, underline things, cross-reference. I'm an autodidact.

People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.