The past looks worse the closer you look at it.

— Hanif Kureishi

There’s a lot of degradation in sex, isn’t there?”“When it’s done right.

— Hanif Kureishi

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it anything more than that is advertising.

— Hanif Kureishi

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivaling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man’s most fatal creation, the devil’s kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshiped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women.

— Hanif Kureishi

What was marriage but sex plus property.

— Hanif Kureishi

When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn’t find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End.

— Hanif Kureishi

Who can think of Larking now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks … Or Eric Gill’s copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils affair, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes’s lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan … Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen.

— Hanif Kureishi

Whoever thought that pleasure makes you happy?

— Hanif Kureishi

Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them.

— Hanif Kureishi

Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.

— Hanif Kureishi