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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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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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Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind
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Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
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What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.
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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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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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Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Dear God, teach me to be careless.
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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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