Hanif Kureishi Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“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 -
“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 -
“You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“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 -
“Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“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 -
“All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“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 -
“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 -
“Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“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 -
“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 -
“I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“Anna Karenina is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. Its gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, its the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“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 -
“I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.”
-- Hanif Kureishi -
“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 -
“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 -
“It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?”
-- Hanif Kureishi
You may also like:
-
Angela Carter
Novelist -
Hugo Weaving
Film actor -
Ian Mcewan
Novelist -
Jeanette Winterson
Writer -
Jeff Goldblum
Actor -
Jim Broadbent
Film actor -
Kazuo Ishiguro
Novelist -
Mark Rylance
Actor -
Martin Amis
Novelist -
Monica Ali
Writer -
Roger Michell
Theatre Director -
Rohinton Mistry
Writer -
Salman Rushdie
Novelist -
Stephen Frears
Film director -
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Writer -
V. S. Naipaul
Writer -
William Trevor
Novelist -
Zadie Smith
Novelist -
Peter O'Toole
Film actor -
Tim Bevan
Film producer