Vikram Chandra famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.
-- Vikram Chandra

#Stories #World
And so I began to read,' Sorkar said. 'And at first the complete works were like a jungle, the language was quicksand. Metaphors turned beneath my feet and became biting snakes, similes fled from my grasp like frightened deer, taking all meaning with them. All was alien, and amidst the hanging, entangling creepers of this foreign grammar, all sound became a cacophany. I feared for myself, for my health and sanity, but then I thought of my purpose, of where I was and who I was, of pain and I pressed on.
-- Vikram Chandra

#Pain #Snakes #Feet
Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.' 'Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.' 'When are we happy?' 'When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.' 'What is regret?' 'To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.' 'What is sorrow?' 'To long for the past.' 'What is the highest pleasure?' 'To hear a good story.
-- Vikram Chandra

#Regret #Hypocrite #Past
When you're a writer, sometimes you have to spend time poking at a part of yourself that normal, sane people leave alone.
-- Vikram Chandra

#People #Normal #Sometimes
I think the first time you have to change code you’ve written previously, to add features or remove a bug, you realize that you could have done it better in the first place, that you could have found an architecture that would make it easier to transform and grow the code. And this is terribly seductive—you’re not just building a solution to a problem, you’re potentially building a beautiful solution, with ‘beautiful’ here being defined here by an aesthetics of present and future functionality. This can be a trap.
-- Vikram Chandra

#Beautiful #Thinking #Seductive
I was writing fiction steadily, but I found that the stark determinisms of code were a welcome relief from the ambiguities of literary narrative.
-- Vikram Chandra

#Writing #Relief #Fiction

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
It's really a sad story, and I liked that. The songs on this album talk about relationships in every aspect.
What's so great about television. You're able to tell a long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.
Of course, I'm not allowed to talk about the script, but I can say it is a really good story.
You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.
God help us if we ever take the theater out of the auction business or anything else. It would be an awfully boring world.
I'm the world's expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.
As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.
Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasnâ€™t easy. I didnâ€™t ask for this. I didnâ€™t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.
It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.

Vikram Chandra famous quotes

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