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

- Hanif Kureishi

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 unhappies…

- Hanif Kureishi

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

- Hanif Kureishi

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.

- Hanif Kureishi

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, a…

- Hanif Kureishi

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

- Hanif Kureishi

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

- Hanif Kureishi

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 th…

- Hanif Kureishi

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

- Hanif Kureishi