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.

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

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

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human.

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

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.

Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.

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

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 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.

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

Harvey [Weinstein] didn't want to release [MY SON THE FANATIC]; he held it for two years because he wanted a happy ending, although I don't know what that means. Does that mean the taxi driver leaves his wife or doesn't leave his wife? I think it has a happy ending.

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

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

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

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.

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

Dear God, teach me to be careless.

If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.

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.

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.

It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?