Quotes from Hanif Kureishi

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

Love cannot be measured by its duration.

People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

Desire, like the dead or an unpleasant meal, would keep returning--it was ultimately indigestible.

One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else's childhood.