HANIF KUREISHI

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?

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

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

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

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

'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.

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.

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 always writing. I'm an obsessive. It's not because I'm a disciplined person. It's because I'm crazy about it.

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.

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

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

...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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

No amount of promises can guarantee love

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?