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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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Hanif Kureishi
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: December 5
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Men
Coming
Insisting
Days
Jew
Woman
Features
Everyone
Claim
Black
Gay
Human
Claims
Brandishing
Humans
Identity
Whichever
Without
Wouldn
Tag

More quotes by Hanif Kureishi

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Almost certainly I will not tell her my intentions this evening or tonight. I will put it off. Why? Because words are actions and they make things happen. Once they are out you cannot put them back.
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Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind
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Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee.
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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?
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Love cannot be measured by its duration.
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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?
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I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.
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You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
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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.
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And silence, like darkness, can be kind it, too, is a language.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
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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.
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I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.
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My pleasures disappeared with my vices.
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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.
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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.
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