Hanif Kureishi Quotes

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

A man’s greatest treasures are his illusions - Durzo Blint

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.

You can't live without illusions, even if you must fight for them.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

A thing can only live through a pious illusion.

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth!

Truth is always a delusion.

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

It is faith that moves mountains, because it gives the illusion that mountains move …. Illusion is perhaps the only reality in life.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Only fools imagine they are already awake. How clearly they understand everything! How easily they distinguish this deception from that reality!

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

... if a man really and truly believed that black was white, you might advise him to see an oculist, but you mustn't call him a liar.