Hanif Kureishi Quotes

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. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Whoever thought that pleasure makes you happy? ~ 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

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man's most fatal creation, the devil's kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women. ~ 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

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

Dear God, teach me to be careless. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

Sex is like art: if you know what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing. ~ Hanif Kureishi

As it was, she always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where rick of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to work hard to fail in her world. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I'd throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. ~ Hanif Kureishi

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn't even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he'd carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn't know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she'd gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he'd chosen for her was an idiot. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God's fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page. ~ Hanif Kureishi

When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn't find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End. ~ Hanif Kureishi

As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm. ~ Hanif Kureishi

In hindsight, I see it was my decision not to let go. I didn't know how, though some days I focused completely on it: using therapy, distraction, exercise. Other days I left myself wildly grieve. Finn affects it all: every conversation I have, what I choose to wear, what books I read, what films and shows I watch. There's that Buddhist quote, (S)he who angers you owns you. She owned me. I allowed it. She controlled me. I knew this feeling of misery would pass, that what I needed was time, but I was impatient. Unfortunately, we must live through the present to get to the future, writes Hanif Kureishi in his novel Intimacy. ~ Chloe Caldwell

The mad were put in asylums, but the sane are worse off in their offices. ~ Hanif Kureishi

He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes. ~ Hanif Kureishi

The best stories are the open ones, those you don't quite understand. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

A man who hasn't left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive. ~ 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

I am dust and my story ends here. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price. ~ 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've said before, Harry, no need to hide your light," said Alice, squeezing his hand. She giggled, "Dance, monkey, dance. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Nothing consoles like the blues. ~ 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

Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed. ~ 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

Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

Someone to whom jokes are never told soon contracts enthusiasm deficiency. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Yet velvet curtains, soft cheese, compelling work and boys who can run full-tilt - it isn't enough. And if it isn't, it isn't. There's no living with that. The world is made from our imagination; our eyes enliven it, as our hands give it shape. Wanting makes it thrive; meaning is what you put in, not what you extract. You only see what you are inclined to see, and no more. We have to make the new. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet. ~ Hanif Kureishi

NASSER: (about OMAR): Haven't you trained him up to look after you, like I have done with my girls?
PAPA: He brushes the dust from one place to another. He squeezes shirts and heats soup. But that hardly stretches him. Though his food stretches me. It's only for a few months, yaar. I'll send him to college in the autumn.
NASSER: (VO) He failed once. He has this chronic laziness that runs in our family except for me.
PAPA: If his arse gets lazy - kick it. I'll send a certificate giving permission. And one more thing. Try and fix him up with a nice girl. I'm not sure if his penis is in full working order. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling and screaming in rage like an angry child. ~ Hanif Kureishi

You see people truly when they enjoy the most. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

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

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

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

But what about ugly bastards? What about us? What about our rights to be kissed? ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

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

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

For those of you curious about the menu, I am drinking tear soup. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Not everything can be achieved alone. ~ 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

London seemed like a house with five thousand rooms, all different; the kick was to work out how they connected, and eventually to walk through all of them. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

A few words of criticism and I can bear a grudge for three days at a time, convinced she is plotting against me. None of this has diminished despite years of self-analysis, therapy and "writing as healing", as some of my students used to call the attempt to make at. Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to. If you asked me, I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas. I'd better enjoy them, then. ~ Hanif Kureishi

'Anna Karenina' is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. It's gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, it's the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Behind every vocation there is a fetish. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant something like this: for various reasons, many of them masochistic, we become involved with others who cannot possibly give what we ask for; we can wait as long as we wish, but they do not have it, and one day, if we bear to abandon our fantasy and see clearly, we might face reality straight on. We will then look elsewhere for fulfillment, to a place where our needs can, in fact, be satisfied. ~ Hanif Kureishi

However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile - such innocence in the way he wanted to understand me, and such possibility of pain, along with the implicit assumption that he wouldn't be harmed - that I pulled away. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

The world's full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry - every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Doesn't civilisation mean keeping your temper when there is no reason for restraint? ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

Illegal drugs are better for you than the legal stuff. How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral, or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture? ~ 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

Does sex make life worth living? Didn't you say, the other day, 'Our lives are only as good as our orgasms'? ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

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

My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them. ~ 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

Who doesn't love cock? ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

There's a lot of degradation in sex, isn't there?"
"When it's done right. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

I know you so well, and you'll feel guilty, simplifying everything, putting the emphasis here or there according to your interest. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

Suicide is one way of saying you're sorry. ~ 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

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

How do I like to write? withe a soft pencil and a hard dick, not the other way round.
I like the paper of all kinds : creamy, white, yellow, thick, thin, lined, plain. In my cupboard I have at least fifty notebooks, each of which, at the time of purchase, filled me with excitement of what might be said of new thoughts discovered ... and then-nothing. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Security and safety were the reward of dullness. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

So badly did he not want to fuck it up, he could only fuck it up. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

Love cannot be measured by its duration... ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted ~ Hanif Kureishi

I have a rule about no material being sacred. ~ Hanif Kureishi

The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I still had no idea what I was going to do. I felt directionless and lost in the crowd. I couldn't yet see how the city worked, but I began to find out. ~ Hanif Kureishi

My pleasures disappeared with my vices. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Is she always elusive?" "Her whole life's a no-show. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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