Hanif Kureishi Quotes:

Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.

Topics: Mean, Being In Love, Childhood

The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.

Topics: Eight, Thirty, Thirty Eight

Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “The Buddha of Suburbia”, p.14, Faber & Faber

Topics: Watches, Domain, Said

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Silence, Darkness, Be Kind

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2010). “Intimacy”, p.83, Faber & Faber

Topics: Important, Belief, Illusion

If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.

Topics: Want, Excuse, Enough, Arrangements

Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.77, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Remains, Without Love

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?

Topics: Distance, People, Relation

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.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “Something to Tell You: A Novel”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Believe, People, Desire

You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.88, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Hate, Loving Someone, Intimacy, Stop Loving Someone

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

Topics: Fire, Burning, Tongue

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.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “The Buddha of Suburbia”, p.90, Faber & Faber

Topics: Thinking, People, Wish

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.

Topics: Grateful, Pleasing Others, Generosity, Money Power

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.

Topics: Husband, People, Blonde, Old You

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.

Topics: Depression, Crush, Letting Go, Self Hatred

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.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.218, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Relationship, Falling In Love, Jobs

Dear God, teach me to be careless.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Dear God, Teach, Dear

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.

Topics: Mean, Son, Thinking

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 ...

Topics: Depression, Baby, Song, Can't Sleep, I Can't Sleep

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.

Topics: Writing, Needs, Kind

I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.

Topics: Reality, Looks, Want

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.

Topics: Falling In Love, Children, Husband, Blokes, Love Betrayal

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

Topics: Philosophical, People, Psychology, Derrida

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2014). “The Word and the Bomb”, p.5, Faber & Faber

Topics: World, Advertising, Vocation

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.

Topics: Crazy, Writing, Obsessive

I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

Topics: Desire, Goodness, Be Good

You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.

Topics: Yesterday, Desire, Beating Yourself Up, Beating Yourself

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.

source: - "Ireland's Champion of Civil Rights". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 8, 2002.

Topics: Jobs, Father, Mean, Civil Servants

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?

Topics: Real, Philosophical, Understanding

...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.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “The Black Album with My Son the Fanatic: A Novel and a Short Story”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Thinking, Doors, Interesting, Hinges

Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?

Topics: Sex, Love Is, Punishment

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

Topics: Running, Insulting, Racist, Philistines

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.

Topics: Months, Chance, Faster

But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.

Topics: President, Gestures, Speech

Love cannot be measured by its duration...

Topics: Duration

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

Topics: Mind, Dictatorship

I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “Something to Tell You: A Novel”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Love Is, Safety, Desire

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

Topics: Vices, Pleasure

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.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Hurt, Stranger, Intimacy, Hurting Someone, Reluctant

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “The Buddha of Suburbia”, p.9, Faber & Faber

Topics: Safety, Rewards, Security

Like you, she will have been with other people, but I've got a feeling there's something between you.

Topics: People, Feelings, Like You

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Tongue, Faults, You Re Beautiful

No amount of promises can guarantee love

Topics: Promise, Guarantees

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2016). “Love in a Blue Time”, p.172, Faber & Faber

Topics: Accepted

Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2016). “Love in a Blue Time”, p.122, Faber & Faber

Topics: Understanding, Different, Dimensions, Different Dimensions

If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2010). “Intimacy”, p.7, Faber & Faber

Topics: Betrayal, Moving, Optimistic

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.

Topics: Tonight, Evening, Action

What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2010). “Intimacy”, p.9, Faber & Faber

Topics: People, Quality, Innocence

My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live accordingly to her own desire.

Topics: Desire, World, Uncomfortable

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “The Black Album”, p.66, Faber & Faber

Topics: Gay, Men, Black

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?

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

Topics: People, Way To Live, Assuming, Promiscuity, Being Bad

Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee.

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2002). “Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories”, p.94, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Children, Knees, Way, Promiscuous

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?

source: - Hanif Kureishi (2009). “The Black Album”, p.37, Faber & Faber

Topics: Thinking, Intimacy, Ends