*

‘Yes, it makes me feel unique for loving the same person continuously for a number of years and not covertly planning to escape. But I do love it here. Every day something is built upon. There is increase. Without it I would be just a man walking down the street with nowhere to go’.
‘At home, for me, there is no movement’.
‘With a real love there is little movement. You are going round and round, but further and further. Don’t you believe in anything? Or is virtue only a last resort for you?’
What could I say here? Young people are full of tedious belief. Why not me? Not many beliefs come spontaneously to mind. We have reached such a state that after two thousand years of Christian civilization, if I meet anyone religious – and, thankfully, I do only rarely these days – I consider  them to be mentally defective and probably in need of therapy.
I might say: I believe in individualism, in sensualism, and in creative idleness. I like the human imagination: its delicacy, its brutal aggressive energy, its profundity, its power to transform the material world into art. I like what men and women make. I prefer this to everything else on earth, apart from love and women’s bodies, which are at the centre of everything worth living for.

—Intimacy.
Hanif Kureishi.