Vikram Seth

I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.

Too many trees are killed to print the words of people who may not have all that much to say, and authors and journalists are equally culpable in this regard.

I have a reputation for being hermitlike. I'm not. I'm just obsessed with my work.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs.

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry - except that he wasn't as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.