Hanif Kureishi quotes:

Anna Karenina' is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. It's gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, it's the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

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.

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

Anna Karenina is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. Its gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, its the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

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

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

In chili's hand were his car keys, Ray-bans and Marlboros, without which he wouldn't leave his bathroom. Chili drank only black coffee and neat Jack Daniel's; his suits were Boss, his underwear Calvin Klein, his actor Pacino. His barber shook his hand, his accountant took him to dinner, his drug dealer would come to him at all hours and accept his checks."

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.

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?

If you get depressed, you can be stuck for months; if you have an analyst, you at least have a chance of getting out of it faster.

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

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.

Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions.

Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them.

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

However, Harry, my clock has stopped. The embalmer is rolling up his sleeves. Even as we speak, seventy-two virgins are slipping into schoolgirl uniforms for me. You must live, and I confirm: always put your penis first.

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.

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.

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

I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things ...

England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.

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.

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.

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?

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.

What was marriage but sex plus property.

...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.

All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

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

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.

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?

But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.

But you're beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want." "Hey, what about the ugly ones?" "The ugly ones." She poked her tongue out. "It's their fault if their ugly. They're to be blamed, not pitied.

Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They'll sit on anyone's knee.

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.

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

Harvey [Weinstein] didn't want to release [MY SON THE FANATIC]; he held it for two years because he wanted a happy ending, although I don't know what that means. Does that mean the taxi driver leaves his wife or doesn't leave his wife? I think it has a happy ending.

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

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

If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.

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.

If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.

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

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

Love cannot be measured by its duration...

My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live accordingly to her own desire.

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

No amount of promises can guarantee love

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted

One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn't. You just end up thinking, who is this person?

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

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

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?

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

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

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

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn't be human.

Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.

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

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?

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

Dear God, teach me to be careless.