Hanif Kureishi > Quotes

“At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“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, Intimacy

“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, Midnight all Day

“You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“Love cannot be measured by its duration...”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You

“If you never left anything or anyone there would be no room for the new. Naturally, to move on is an infidelity -- to others, to the past, to old notions of oneself. Perhaps every day should contain at least one essential infidelity or necessary betrayal. It would be an optimistic, hopeful act, guaranteeing belief in the future -- a declaration that things can be not only different but better.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“Dear God, teach me to be careless.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others. ”
― Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You

“Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Collected Stories

“I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“No amount of promises can guarantee love”
― Hanif Kureishi, Love in a Blue Time

“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

“And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories

“...I love 'yes.' It's practically the most interesting word of all, don't you think?" Like a hinge opening a door outward. Yes, yes, yes.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Black Album

“Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?”
― Hanif Kureishi

“So badly did he not want to fuck it up, he could only fuck it up.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You

“The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Word and the Bomb

“Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted”
― Hanif Kureishi, Love in a Blue Time

“But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Love in a Blue Time

“Security and safety were the reward of dullness.”
― Hanif Kureishi

“I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“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, The Black Album

“My pleasures disappeared with my vices. ”
― Hanif Kureishi, Something to Tell You