Quotes from Hanif Kureishi

I was falling in love with myself. Not that beauty, or life itself, means much if you're in a room on your own. Heaven is other people.

How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?

England's a nice place if you're rich, but otherwise it's a fucking swamp of prejudice, class confusion, the whole thing.

For him in India the British were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he'd made me feel that we couldn't allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people. You couldn't let the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be. They were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn.

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.

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

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

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

Unlike films, plays don't take place in the past. The fear,anxiety of the actors is happening now, in front of you. If performing is risky, we identify with the possibility of granduer and disaster (The Body and Seven Stories).

It is only the insane who achieve anything significant.

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

It was easy to see that he was clever and well read, but he was also boring.

Most people don't know how to maximise their pleasure, they sexualise their pain. Surely you've noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they're not turned on by.

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.

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.

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

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.

At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins.

One day everything changed. In the morning things were one way and by bedtime another. I was seventeen.

Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient.

Clothes and accessories were a person's creativity; how someone looked was always a free decision, like a brushstroke on a painting.

You're smart enough to recognize that the subjects of migraines and cats never fail with the women. Lead the old girl toward the mint tea.

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

But why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live, as if everybody else is inadequate? Why can't they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?