Hanif Kureishi

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

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.

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