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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.

Hanif Kureishi

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Hanif Kureishi
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 5
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Support
Family
Respectability
Bigs
Respectable
Jobs
Regular
Father
Servant
Sense
Civil
Mean
Deal
Deals

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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
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The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
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What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.
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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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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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Dear God, teach me to be careless.
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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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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
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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.
Hanif Kureishi
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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?
Hanif Kureishi
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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've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.
Hanif Kureishi
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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?
Hanif Kureishi
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Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted
Hanif Kureishi