Quotes by Hanif Kureishi

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.

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 didnt 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 couldnt 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.

I admired him more than anyone but I didnt 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.

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

Dear God, teach me to be careless.

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?

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!

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

Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn´t dislike anyone youd seen sleep

Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt—it isnt enough. And if it isnt, it isnt. Theres 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.

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

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.