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Hanif Kureishi Inspirational Quotes (30)

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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
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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
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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
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What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.
Hanif Kureishi
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The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
Hanif Kureishi
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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
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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
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Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind
Hanif Kureishi
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I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.
Hanif Kureishi
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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
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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
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Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted
Hanif Kureishi
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I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.
Hanif Kureishi
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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
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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.
Hanif Kureishi
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My pleasures disappeared with my vices.
Hanif Kureishi
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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
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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
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Dear God, teach me to be careless.
Hanif Kureishi
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But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.
Hanif Kureishi
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And silence, like darkness, can be kind it, too, is a language.
Hanif Kureishi
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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
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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
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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
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