Hanif Kureishi Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn't give. — Hanif Kureishi

This ghost of a mother had begun to ask him questions about who he was and who he truly loved. Was he capable of love? — 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

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

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

I've learned that unfeeling, bloodsucking men like you need to reduce women to manageable cliches, even to destroy them, for the sake of control. — Hanif Kureishi

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

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

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

I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on mattresses in ruined houses rather than working in the machine. I didn't want to work in a place where I couldn't wear my fur coat. — Hanif Kureishi

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

You're one of those old-fashioned, romantic men for whom women aren't really there unless you decide we are. — 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

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

My father had the right idea. Begin from an assumption of insanity and then laugh, where possible. — Hanif Kureishi

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

One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else's childhood. — Hanif Kureishi

It was easy to see that he was clever and well read, but he was also boring. — 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

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

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

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

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

Who doesn't love cock? — Hanif Kureishi

Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. — Hanif Kureishi

I can't quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another - me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority - which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses. — 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

Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them. — 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

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

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

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

One day everything changed. In the morning things were one way and by bedtime another. I was seventeen. — 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

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

'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

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

Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game's up. — Hanif Kureishi

The girl had many virtues: money, a car
a gold-coloured Capri, in which she played the latest funk
a big house and a rich father. When Valentin asked, 'What does your boyfriend do?' she replied, 'But I don't have one, really. — Hanif Kureishi

It is only the insane who achieve anything significant. — Hanif Kureishi

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

Suicide is one way of saying you're sorry. — Hanif Kureishi

Mutual transformation is rare, as good things are. In my view, a person should live as they wish until they find someone they want to be faithful to. After all, as you say, one can't suck oneself off. — Hanif Kureishi

Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks ... Or Eric Gill's copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes's lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan ... Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen. — Hanif Kureishi

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

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

Old age is the new childhood. — 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

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

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

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

It's frustration which makes creativity possible. — Hanif Kureishi

Growing old isn't for pussies. — Hanif Kureishi

At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins. — 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

Transgression affirms the very rules it intends to flout. Nothing supports the norm like deviation. — Hanif Kureishi

Behind every vocation there is a fetish. — 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

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

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

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

You see people truly when they enjoy the most. — 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

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

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

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

Harry had loved most of the arts long enough to know that artists had to be excused failings which would condemn the general population. The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price. Artists were allowed, indeed encouraged, to lead more libidinous lives on behalf of others who had, of necessity, to leave their jouissance, at the door while they worked. — Hanif Kureishi

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

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

Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient. — Hanif Kureishi

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

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

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

How utterly our past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once. — Hanif Kureishi

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

I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me. — 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

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

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

Harry leaned forward. You put your penis on the page. — 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

Surely you've noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they're not turned on by. — Hanif Kureishi

A monster is someone who's being monstered. — 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

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

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

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

People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know. — 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

My blackness is spreading, Alice. I've been seeing and hearing things that can't be there or anywhere. At night, when I'm not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I'll have to give this thing up and write a novel. — Hanif Kureishi

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

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

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