Quotes from Hanif Kureishi

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

Love cannot be measured by its duration...

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

Dear God, teach me to be careless.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. 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?

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?

No amount of promises can guarantee love

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

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.

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?