Hanif Kureishi quotes

You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them. (Hanif Kureishi)
I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.
Hanif Kureishi
... 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
How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.
Hanif Kureishi
Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.
Hanif Kureishi
The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.
Hanif Kureishi
Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted.
Hanif Kureishi
Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.
Hanif Kureishi
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.
Hanif Kureishi
Dear God, teach me to be careless.
Hanif Kureishi
What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed. (Hanif Kureishi)
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
Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
Hanif Kureishi
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
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
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
I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.
Hanif Kureishi
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
Love cannot be measured by its duration.
Hanif Kureishi
The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.
Hanif Kureishi
Anna Karenina is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. Its gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, its the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children. (Hanif Kureishi)
No amount of promises can guarantee love.
Hanif Kureishi
They gave us the language but it is only we who know how to use it.
Hanif Kureishi
Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.
Hanif Kureishi
You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.
Hanif Kureishi