Top 100 Hanif Kureishi Quotes
#1. As suburbs go, Bromley's not bad. But as David Bowie and Hanif Kureishi have observed, you do want to get out of there quickly.
Tibor Fischer
#2. I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#3. 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
#4. Transgression affirms the very rules it intends to flout. Nothing supports the norm like deviation.
Hanif Kureishi
#5. But to be able to bear one's own mind, to wait while the inner storm of intolerable thoughts blows itself out, leaving one to contemplate the debris with some understanding--that is an enviable state of mind.
Hanif Kureishi
#7. 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
#8. This was the English passion, not for self-improvement or culture or wit, but for DIY, Do It Yourself, for bigger and better houses with more mod cons, the painstaking accumulation of comfort and, with it, status - the concrete display of earned cash.
Hanif Kureishi
#9. He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.
Hanif Kureishi
#10. What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.
Hanif Kureishi
#11. 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
#12. I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.
Hanif Kureishi
#13. Women are brought up to think of others. [ ... ] When I start to think of myself I feel sick.
Hanif Kureishi
#15. Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.
Hanif Kureishi
#16. It is only the insane who achieve anything significant.
Hanif Kureishi
#17. Suddenly I shouted into the night air. 'Yes, yes, yes, it is true!
And now the world had some tension in it; now it twanged and vibrated with meaning and possibility! 'Yes, yes, fucking yes!
Hanif Kureishi
#18. One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn't. You just end up thinking, who is this person?
Hanif Kureishi
#19. But Harry wondered if he might be getting too old for the dispiriting adventure that seemed to inevitably accompany the need for human contact.
Hanif Kureishi
#20. But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.
Hanif Kureishi
#21. Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. ... Why can't they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?
Hanif Kureishi
#23. 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
#25. After a bit you realize there's only one invaluable commodity. Not gold or love, but time.
Hanif Kureishi
#26. I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me.
Hanif Kureishi
#28. You're one of those old-fashioned, romantic men for whom women aren't really there unless you decide we are.
Hanif Kureishi
#29. 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
#30. But you're beautiful, and the beautiful should be given whatever they want."
"Hey, what about the ugly ones?"
"The ugly ones." She poked her tongue out. "It's their fault if their ugly. They're to be blamed, not pitied.
Hanif Kureishi
#31. Marriage domesticates sex but frees love. It is unsuitable as a solution to human need, but as with capitalism, the alternatives are much worse.
Hanif Kureishi
#32. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all. Still, rather a fool than a fascist.
Hanif Kureishi
#33. Sex is like art: if you know what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing.
Hanif Kureishi
#34. The mad were put in asylums, but the sane are worse off in their offices.
Hanif Kureishi
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. One day everything changed. In the morning things were one way and by bedtime another. I was seventeen.
Hanif Kureishi
#39. One night, when I am old, sick, right out of semen, and don't need things to get any worse, I hear the voices again.
Hanif Kureishi
#40. The truth is a tattoo on your forehead. You can't see it yourself. I am your mirror.
Hanif Kureishi
#41. Apparently the town, a triumph of post-war socialist planning was a sewer, full of tattooed beasts and violent zombies, with vomit and blood frothing in the gutters. I couldn't wait to see it.
Hanif Kureishi
#42. Like you, she will have been with other people, but I've got a feeling there's something between you.
Hanif Kureishi
#43. And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language
Hanif Kureishi
#44. 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
#45. I'm using Mao as my inspiration. "Cast away illusions. Prepare for struggle." I'm back in business, baby. You don't know you're stuck until you get moving.
Hanif Kureishi
#46. You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.
Hanif Kureishi
#47. Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that's where to head, boy.
Hanif Kureishi
#48. For those of you curious about the menu, I am drinking tear soup.
Hanif Kureishi
#49. He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes.
Hanif Kureishi
#50. 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
#51. Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They'll sit on anyone's knee.
Hanif Kureishi
#52. For him, the writer should be the very devil, a disturber of dreams and wrecker of fatuous utopias, the bringer-in of reality, and rival of God in his wish to make worlds.
Hanif Kureishi
#53. Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living.
Hanif Kureishi
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. He had some impression that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived.
Hanif Kureishi
#58. 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
#59. The truth is,everything we really desire is either forbidden,immoral or unhealthy, and if you're lucky, all three at once.
Hanif Kureishi
#60. I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.
Hanif Kureishi
#62. Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient.
Hanif Kureishi
#63. Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.
Hanif Kureishi
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Harry leaned forward. You put your penis on the page.
Hanif Kureishi
#67. 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
#68. He felt like a criminal, though the only laws he'd broken were his own, and he wasn't sure which ones they were.
Hanif Kureishi
#69. I've said before, Harry, no need to hide your light," said Alice, squeezing his hand. She giggled, "Dance, monkey, dance.
Hanif Kureishi
#71. England's a nice place if you're rich, but otherwise it's a fucking swamp of prejudice, class confusion, the whole thing.
Hanif Kureishi
#72. Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them.
Hanif Kureishi
#74. The "master" would always be the one who could wait without anxiety;
Hanif Kureishi
#75. 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
#76. 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.
Hanif Kureishi
#77. My father had the right idea. Begin from an assumption of insanity and then laugh, where possible.
Hanif Kureishi
#78. Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness.
Hanif Kureishi
#80. Of course, when you love the unwell, you constantly have to ask yourself: Do I love her, or her illness? Am I her lover or her healer?
Hanif Kureishi
#83. Does sex make life worth living? Didn't you say, the other day, 'Our lives are only as good as our orgasms'?
Hanif Kureishi
#84. All sex, and indeed all pleasure, must include a poisonous drop of perversion, of devilish transgression - of evil, even - for it to be worth getting into bed for.
Hanif Kureishi
#85. My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live accordingly to her own desire.
Hanif Kureishi
#86. If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.
Hanif Kureishi
#87. But what about ugly bastards? What about us? What about our rights to be kissed?
Hanif Kureishi
#88. How utterly our past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once.
Hanif Kureishi
#89. 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
#90. Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.
Hanif Kureishi
#91. 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
#92. 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
#95. The best stories are the open ones, those you don't quite understand.
Hanif Kureishi
#96. 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
#97. One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else's childhood.
Hanif Kureishi
#99. Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn't give.
Hanif Kureishi
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
