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

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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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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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Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
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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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Love cannot be measured by its duration.
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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.
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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.
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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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You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
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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.
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And silence, like darkness, can be kind it, too, is a language.
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I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.
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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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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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Dear God, teach me to be careless.
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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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The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
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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 am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.
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