Hanif Kureishi Quotes

As I look back over my life, I've been an active person - obviously I was self-absorbed for a period of time.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

Life can only be understood backwards.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

Every year, I appreciate life more because of the deeper understanding of what it took to get this far.

As you mature, you start reading and studying and researching, you start to really know what life is about.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

I've had quite a life, when you stop and think about it.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

I'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

I always write to understand my place in the world. I can see myself and my life unfold on the page, and I can understand my strengths, my weaknesses - I can see where I need to step up a bit.

The older you get the more you understand what you're doing.

I'm beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

I feel like every movie, I've learned more and more about what I think of the world and what I'm trying to figure out.

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Many things have been said about what happened, but I don't know either. Maybe someday. One thing I'm sure of is that all the things that have happened to me, good and bad, happy and sad, have made me what I am today.

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.