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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
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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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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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.
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My pleasures disappeared with my vices.
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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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Love cannot be measured by its duration.
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The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
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Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
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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.
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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've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.
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I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.
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Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind
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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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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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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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You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
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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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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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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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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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