Hanif Kureishi

Act _ make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.

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

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child.

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn__ even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he__ carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn__ know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she__ gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he__ chosen for her was an idiot.

If there__ no sacrifice, there__ no love.

Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.

Old age is the new childhood.

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised 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__ fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed _ they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page.

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man__ most fatal creation, the devil__ kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped 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.

Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.

I am dust and my story ends here.

I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat.

Mamoon went on, __he news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction._ He raised his glass. __ll the best then, my friends. Here__ to a happy apocalypse.___appy apocalypse,_ murmured the other guests, obediently.

Whoever thought that pleasure makes you happy?

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

Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions.

He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.