Hanif Kureishi Quotes

Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.

If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.

England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.

Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.

I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.

At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.

I guess writing is a kind of therapy in the sense that there are things you need to say and you say them, and better out than in.

What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.

Love cannot be measured by its duration.

Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.

You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.

Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?

At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?

I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.

I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things.

My father was a civil servant, so having a regular job, being respectable is a big deal for me. Respectable in the sense that I support my family. That's what I mean by respectability.

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

Almost certainly I will not tell her my intentions this evening or tonight. I will put it off. Why? Because words are actions and they make things happen. Once they are out you cannot put them back.

Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee.

No amount of promises can guarantee love

But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.

...I love 'yes.' It's practically the most interesting word of all, don't you think?" Like a hinge opening a door outward. Yes, yes, yes.

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted

Dear God, teach me to be careless.

Like you, she will have been with other people, but I've got a feeling there's something between you.

If you get depressed, you can be stuck for months; if you have an analyst, you at least have a chance of getting out of it faster.

One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn’t. You just end up thinking, who is this person?

My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live accordingly to her own desire.

I'm always writing. I'm an obsessive. It's not because I'm a disciplined person. It's because I'm crazy about it.

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.

Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.

Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness.

I don’t like being left for long struggling with my dangerous self.

It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.

Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them.

People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it anything more than that is advertising.

The past looks worse the closer you look at it.