185 Quotes by Hanif Kureishi

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

The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction.

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.

For those of you curious about the menu, I am drinking tear soup.

But Harry wondered if he might be getting too old for the dispiriting adventure that seemed to inevitably accompany the need for human contact.

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

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 wouldn’t be harmed – that I pulled away.

Clothes and accessories were a person’s creativity; how someone looked was always a free decision, like a brushstroke on a painting.

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