Hanif Kureishi Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Hanif Kureishi
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?

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

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

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
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.

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

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

Hanif Kureishi
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
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.

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

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
They gave us the language but it is only we who know how to use it

Hanif Kureishi
Everyone looks at you…and thinks: an Indian boy, how exotic, how interesting, what stories of aunties and elephants we'll hear now from him. And you're from Orpington.

Hanif Kureishi
My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.

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

Hanif Kureishi