Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Hanif Kureishi
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: December 5
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Term
Understanding
Language
Breakthroughs
Doe
Breakthrough
Come
Philosophical
Real
Seemed
Work
Terms
Century

More quotes by 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
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
What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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
Image
But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.
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
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.
Hanif Kureishi
Image
Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted
Hanif Kureishi
Image
Love cannot be measured by its duration.
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
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
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
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
Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind
Hanif Kureishi
Image
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
Image
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
Image
And silence, like darkness, can be kind it, too, is a language.
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
Dear God, teach me to be careless.
Hanif Kureishi