Top 100 Hanif Kureishi Quotes

#1. I love 'yes.' It's practically the most interesting word of all, don't you think? Like a hinge opening a door outward. Yes, yes, yes.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #21251
#2. I have a rule about no material being sacred.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #52559
#3. It was clear that Eleanor had been to bed with a large and random collection of people, but when I suggested she go to bed with me, she said, 'I don't think we should, just at the moment, do you?' As a man I found this pretty fucking insulting.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #62259
#4. The questions had become: What can we forgive in others? How far do they have to go before we lose faith in them?

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #72782
#5. Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #74005
#6. Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #84832
#7. You see people truly when they enjoy the most.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #88294
#8. I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #89807
#9. The truth is,everything we really desire is either forbidden,immoral or unhealthy, and if you're lucky, all three at once.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #100560
#10. She screamed - more like a week. She informed me that a woman who doesn't have an orgasm a day will get dry skin, and lines. According to her you should rub your lover's semen into your forehead.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #116115
#11. If you get depressed, you can be stuck for months; if you have an analyst, you at least have a chance of getting out of it faster.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #143044
#12. To be well married you have to a penchant for the intricacies of intimacy and larval change..If the personality is a spider's web, you will want to know every thread ... Pleasures no longer come to you, but there are pickings to be had if you can learn to scavenge for them" ("The Body")

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #149396
#13. Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #175531
#14. England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #185732
#15. I love the razor's edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can't bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #202211
#16. Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn't give.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #202969
#17. Because it is about that which we can't be prepared for - the great test we men have passed before, but have no way of knowing we will pass again.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #248943
#18. The best stories are the open ones, those you don't quite understand.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #255410
#19. Nothing consoles like the blues.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #256422
#20. Whoever thought that pleasure makes you happy?

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #265497
#21. Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #269023
#22. You're smart enough to recognize that the subjects of migraines and cats never fail with the women. Lead the old girl toward the mint tea.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #278867
#23. Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #281675
#24. My father had the right idea. Begin from an assumption of insanity and then laugh, where possible.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #289782
#25. How utterly our past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #289887
#26. But what about ugly bastards? What about us? What about our rights to be kissed?

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #298069
#27. If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #313581
#28. My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live accordingly to her own desire.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #379716
#29. I'm turning off; rebelling against rebellion.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #391487
#30. If there's no sacrifice, there's no love.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #393970
#31. I'm always writing. I'm an obsessive. It's not because I'm a disciplined person. It's because I'm crazy about it.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #435264
#32. I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #459220
#33. After a bit you realize there's only one invaluable commodity. Not gold or love, but time.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #472059
#34. Growing old isn't for pussies.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #476876
#35. I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #477832
#36. Love cannot be measured by its duration...

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #485801
#37. But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #504783
#38. Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #601272
#39. That's where the public like their artists - exposed, trousers down, arse up, doing a long stretch among serial killers, and shitting in front of strangers. That'll teach 'em to think their talent makes them better than mediocre no-brain tax-paying wage slaves like us.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #631819
#40. What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #634374
#41. He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #640932
#42. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #649501
#43. My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #650980
#44. I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things ...

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #692431
#45. The truth is a tattoo on your forehead. You can't see it yourself. I am your mirror.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #704248
#46. If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #724903
#47. He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #728712
#48. Mamoon went on, "The 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. "All the best then, my friends. Here's to a happy apocalypse."
"Happy apocalypse," murmured the other guests, obediently.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #766455
#49. And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #774480
#50. We are surviving, in this pleasant liberal enclave where people read and speak freely, on borrowed time. But for those not inside - the dispossessed of the world, the poor, the refugees and those forced into exile - existence is wasteland.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #839977
#51. Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #853409
#52. Unlike films, plays don't take place in the past. The fear,anxiety of the actors is happening now, in front of you. If performing is risky, we identify with the possibility of granduer and disaster" ("The Body" and Seven Stories).

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #868189
#53. The mad were put in asylums, but the sane are worse off in their offices.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #870040
#54. And so I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved, which itself sat at the bottom of a tiny island. I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn't always be this way.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #930314
#55. I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #982080
#56. People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #997449
#57. Doesn't civilisation mean keeping your temper when there is no reason for restraint?

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #998856
#58. The interesting people you wanted to be with - their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1049143
#59. Those magical fucks, when everything else falls away.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1081120
#60. Everything has become very conventional. You're either in or you're out. I'm with the out- with the weird, the impossible, the victimised and the broken. It's the only place to be.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1113293
#61. Suicide is one way of saying you're sorry.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1156215
#62. I guess writing is a kind of therapy in the sense that there are things you need to say and you say them, and better out than in.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1160448
#63. At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1168540
#64. People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1200185
#65. The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1240333
#66. Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1244083
#67. Almost certainly I will not tell her my intentions this evening or tonight. I will put it off. Why? Because words are actions and they make things happen. Once they are out you cannot put them back.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1260910
#68. 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's up.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1276587
#69. The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1287830
#70. For Mum, life was fundamentally hell. You went blind, you got raped, people forgot your birthday, Nixon got elected, your husband fled with a blonde from Beckenham, and then you got old, you couldn't walk and you died.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1297346
#71. Most people don't know how to maximize their pleasure, Harry, they sexualize their pain.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1331452
#72. Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1397597
#73. Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1415322
#74. Old age is the new childhood.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1426710
#75. The girl had many virtues: money, a car
a gold-coloured Capri, in which she played the latest funk
a big house and a rich father. When Valentin asked, 'What does your boyfriend do?' she replied, 'But I don't have one, really.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1431507
#76. What was marriage but sex plus property.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1434596
#77. I've said it's over for the white races, an obvious truth which caused much agitation amongst the journalists. The rich will rule as usual; they come in all colours, particularly yellow.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1486155
#78. Harvey [Weinstein] didn't want to release [MY SON THE FANATIC]; he held it for two years because he wanted a happy ending, although I don't know what that means. Does that mean the taxi driver leaves his wife or doesn't leave his wife? I think it has a happy ending.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1500620
#79. You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1523437
#80. Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1527642
#81. NASSER: In this damn country that we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It's all spread out and availble. That's why I believe in England. You just have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1539927
#82. My father was a civil servant, so having a regular job, being respectable is a big deal for me. Respectable in the sense that I support my family. That's what I mean by respectability.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1553331
#83. You see, I have come to believe in self-help, individual initiative, the love of what you do, and the full development of all individuals. I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1584747
#84. Surely you've noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they're not turned on by.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1588368
#85. I have learned that the libido, like Elvis and jealousy, never dies. I know copulators of eighty-five. Who said you need an erection, a body or an orgasm for sex?

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1605023
#86. 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.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1608485
#87. Is she always elusive?" "Her whole life's a no-show.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1649182
#88. A man who hasn't left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1652825
#89. Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1661054
#90. At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1672073
#91. The madness of writing was the antidote to true madness.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1686595
#92. If you want to know a man, see how he is in love.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1694603
#93. YOU HAVE TO FIND THE RIGHT DISTANCE BETWEEN PEOPLE. TOO CLOSE, AND THEY OVERWHELM YOU, TOO FAR AND THEY ABANDON YOU.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1709748
#94. I can't quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another - me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority - which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1743731
#95. This ghost of a mother had begun to ask him questions about who he was and who he truly loved. Was he capable of love?

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1793278
#96. I'd send Eleanor a dignified note. Then I'd have to fall out of love with her. That was the rough part. Everything in life is organized around people falling in love with each other. Falling is easy; but no one tells you how to fall out of love. I didn't know where to begin.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1808039
#97. How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1810920
#98. In our offices and places of work we love to tell others what to do.We denigrate them.We compare their work unfavourably with our own.We are always in competition.We show off and gossip.Our dream is of being well treated and we dream of treating others badly ...

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1814392
#99. And if anyone manages to get their sexuality and their love lined up together, they are indeed lucky. It is as rare as a fine spring day in the country.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1835784
#100. I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi Quotes #1856080

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