Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Hanif Kureishi
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 5
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Human
Claims
Brandishing
Humans
Identity
Whichever
Without
Wouldn
Tag
Men
Coming
Insisting
Days
Jew
Woman
Features
Everyone
Claim
Black
Gay

More quotes by Hanif Kureishi

Image
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
Image
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
Image
The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
Dear God, teach me to be careless.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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
Image
Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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
Image
Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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
Image
You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
And silence, like darkness, can be kind it, too, is a language.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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
Image
I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
Love cannot be measured by its duration.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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