Vikram Seth Quotes

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I like to write poetry.

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

I've written poetry most of my life.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.