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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.

Hanif Kureishi

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Hanif Kureishi
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 5
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Walks
Fundamentally
Hell
Elected
Went
Birthday
Fled
Life
Blind
Raped
People
Died
Nixon
Husband
Blonde
Couldn
Forgot
Walk
Mum

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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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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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And silence, like darkness, can be kind it, too, is a language.
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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.
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What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.
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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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The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
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Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind
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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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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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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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Dear God, teach me to be careless.
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Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
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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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My pleasures disappeared with my vices.
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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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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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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 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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