Hanif Kureishi Quotes

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

The world's full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry - every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them.

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

As it was, she always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where rick of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to work hard to fail in her world.

A monster is someone who's being monstered.

I've said it's over for the white races, an obvious truth which caused much agitation amongst the journalists. The rich will rule as usual; they come in all colours, particularly yellow.

I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!

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

I'd send Eleanor a dignified note. Then I'd have to fall out of love with her. That was the rough part. Everything in life is organized around people falling in love with each other. Falling is easy; but no one tells you how to fall out of love. I didn't know where to begin.

All sex, and indeed all pleasure, must include a poisonous drop of perversion, of devilish transgression - of evil, even - for it to be worth getting into bed for.

you can't just let people down, dammit.

I can't quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another - me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority - which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.

Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness.

Everything has become very conventional. You're either in or you're out. I'm with the out- with the weird, the impossible, the victimised and the broken. It's the only place to be.

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

NASSER: In this damn country that we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It's all spread out and availble. That's why I believe in England. You just have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

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

Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that's where to head, boy.

A man who hasn't left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive.

The best stories are the open ones, those you don't quite understand.

A few words of criticism and I can bear a grudge for three days at a time, convinced she is plotting against me. None of this has diminished despite years of self-analysis, therapy and "writing as healing", as some of my students used to call the attempt to make at. Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to. If you asked me, I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas. I'd better enjoy them, then.

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn't even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he'd carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn't know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she'd gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he'd chosen for her was an idiot.

Those magical fucks, when everything else falls away.

For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.

Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.

So badly did he not want to fuck it up, he could only fuck it up.

London seemed like a house with five thousand rooms, all different; the kick was to work out how they connected, and eventually to walk through all of them.

He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.

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.

'Anna Karenina' is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. It's gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, it's the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

Illegal drugs are better for you than the legal stuff. How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral, or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?

The "master" would always be the one who could wait without anxiety;

One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the voices again.

Is she always elusive?" "Her whole life's a no-show.

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

Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?

That's where the public like their artists - exposed, trousers down, arse up, doing a long stretch among serial killers, and shitting in front of strangers. That'll teach 'em to think their talent makes them better than mediocre no-brain tax-paying wage slaves like us.

Most people don't know how to maximize their pleasure, Harry, they sexualize their pain.

Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency.

When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn't find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End.

Talent might be a gift but it still has to be cultivated. The imagination is like a fire or furnace: it has to be stoked, fed and attended to. One thing sets another ablaze. Keep it going.

He felt like a criminal, though the only laws he'd broken were his own, and he wasn't sure which ones they were.

Marriage domesticates sex but frees love. It is unsuitable as a solution to human need, but as with capitalism, the alternatives are much worse.

The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction.

However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile - such innocence in the way he wanted to understand me, and such possibility of pain, along with the implicit assumption that he wouldn't be harmed - that I pulled away.

The truth is,everything we really desire is either forbidden,immoral or unhealthy, and if you're lucky, all three at once.

My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.

I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me.

I'm turning off; rebelling against rebellion.

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted

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

If there's no sacrifice, there's no love.

I know you so well, and you'll feel guilty, simplifying everything, putting the emphasis here or there according to your interest.

Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I'd throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it.

But to be able to bear one's own mind, to wait while the inner storm of intolerable thoughts blows itself out, leaving one to contemplate the debris with some understanding--that is an enviable state of mind.

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

But what about ugly bastards? What about us? What about our rights to be kissed?

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

And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn't always be this way.

For those of you curious about the menu, I am drinking tear soup.

NASSER: (about OMAR): Haven't you trained him up to look after you, like I have done with my girls?
PAPA: He brushes the dust from one place to another. He squeezes shirts and heats soup. But that hardly stretches him. Though his food stretches me. It's only for a few months, yaar. I'll send him to college in the autumn.
NASSER: (VO) He failed once. He has this chronic laziness that runs in our family except for me.
PAPA: If his arse gets lazy - kick it. I'll send a certificate giving permission. And one more thing. Try and fix him up with a nice girl. I'm not sure if his penis is in full working order.

Apparently the town, a triumph of post-war socialist planning was a sewer, full of tattooed beasts and violent zombies, with vomit and blood frothing in the gutters. I couldn't wait to see it.

Does sex make life worth living? Didn't you say, the other day, 'Our lives are only as good as our orgasms'?

It was clear that Eleanor had been to bed with a large and random collection of people, but when I suggested she go to bed with me, she said, 'I don't think we should, just at the moment, do you?' As a man I found this pretty fucking insulting.

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.

Doesn't civilisation mean keeping your temper when there is no reason for restraint?

We are surviving, in this pleasant liberal enclave where people read and speak freely, on borrowed time. But for those not inside - the dispossessed of the world, the poor, the refugees and those forced into exile - existence is wasteland.

Whoever thought that pleasure makes you happy?

The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price.

He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes.

As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm.

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?

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man's most fatal creation, the devil's kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women.

Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt - it isn't enough. And if it isn't, it isn't. There's no living with that. The world is made from our imagination; our eyes enliven it, as our hands give it shape. Wanting makes it thrive; meaning is what you put in, not what you extract. You only see what you are inclined to see, and no more. We have to make the new.

The mad were put in asylums, but the sane are worse off in their offices.

I'm using Mao as my inspiration. "Cast away illusions. Prepare for struggle." I'm back in business, baby. You don't know you're stuck until you get moving.

Not everything can be achieved alone.

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?

How do I like to write? withe a soft pencil and a hard dick, not the other way round.
I like the paper of all kinds : creamy, white, yellow, thick, thin, lined, plain. In my cupboard I have at least fifty notebooks, each of which, at the time of purchase, filled me with excitement of what might be said of new thoughts discovered ... and then-nothing.

I have a rule about no material being sacred.

If you want to know a man, see how he is in love.

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.

I've said before, Harry, no need to hide your light," said Alice, squeezing his hand. She giggled, "Dance, monkey, dance.

In our offices and places of work we love to tell others what to do.We denigrate them.We compare their work unfavourably with our own.We are always in competition.We show off and gossip.Our dream is of being well treated and we dream of treating others badly ...

There's a lot of degradation in sex, isn't there?"
"When it's done right.

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.

And if anyone manages to get their sexuality and their love lined up together, they are indeed lucky. It is as rare as a fine spring day in the country.

Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.

You're one of those old-fashioned, romantic men for whom women aren't really there unless you decide we are.

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

Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn't give.

Love cannot be measured by its duration...

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

The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition.

But you're beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want."
"Hey, what about the ugly ones?"
"The ugly ones." She poked her tongue out. "It's their fault if their ugly. They're to be blamed, not pitied.

I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.

All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God's fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page.

You see people truly when they enjoy the most.