185 Quotes by Hanif Kureishi

I love the razor’s edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can’t bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted.

I have a rule about no material being sacred.

Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living.

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

Sometimes he’d get home before the children were asleep, and carry them around on his back, kick balls with them, and tell them stories of pigs with spiders on their heads. Other times he would turn up late so he could have his wife make supper, and be free of the feeling that the kids were devouring his life.

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.

Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict.

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