Quotes by Hanif Kureishi

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

You dont stop loving someone just because you hate them.

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.

People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities.

But youre beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want.Hey, what about the ugly ones?The ugly ones. She poked her tongue out. Its their fault if their ugly. Theyre to be blamed, not pitied.

Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness.

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 wouldnt be harmed - that I pulled away.

What was marriage but sex plus property.

Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant something like this: for various reasons, many of them masochistic, we become involved with others who cannot possibly give what we ask for; we can wait as long as we wish, but they do not have it, and one day, if we bear to abandon our fantasy and see clearly, we might face reality straight on. We will then look elsewhere for fulfillment, to a place where our needs can, in fact, be satisfied.

I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure.

I have learned that the libido, like Elvis and jealousy, never dies. I know copulators of eighty-five. Who said you need an erection, a body or an orgasm for sex?

Sex is like art: if you know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing.

There’s a lot of degradation in sex, isn’t there?”“When it’s done right.

You see, I have come to believe in self-help, individual initiative, the love of what you do, and the full development of all individuals. I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.

It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.

My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywhere. At night, when I’m not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I’ll have to give this thing up and write a novel.

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.

I don’t like being left for long struggling with my dangerous self.

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

The past looks worse the closer you look at it.