My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywhere. At night, when I’m not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I’ll have to give this thing up and write a novel.

— Hanif Kureishi

My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.

— Hanif Kureishi

Now, watching her sleep, and closing his eyes, he felt, in this particular intimacy - stowed beneath her duvet - that he was intruding. At the same time, he knew, settling down, you couldn't dislike anyone you'd seen sleep

— Hanif Kureishi

Old age is the new childhood.

— Hanif Kureishi

People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities.

— Hanif Kureishi

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognized how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God’s fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page.

— Hanif Kureishi

Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomized by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game’s up.

— Hanif Kureishi

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

— Hanif Kureishi

Sex is like art: if you know what you’re doing, you don’t know what you’re doing.

— Hanif Kureishi

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. Furthermore, I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out.

— Hanif Kureishi