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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: 70
Born: 1954
Born: December 5
Author
Film Director
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Hell
Elected
Went
Birthday
Fled
Life
Blind
Raped
People
Died
Nixon
Husband
Blonde
Couldn
Forgot
Walk
Mum
Walks
Fundamentally

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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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I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.
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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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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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My pleasures disappeared with my vices.
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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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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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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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And silence, like darkness, can be kind it, too, is a language.
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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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You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
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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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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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