Hanif Kureishi quotes

Hanif Kureishi is a British playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and filmmaker, renowned for exploring themes of race, identity, and sexuality. His critically acclaimed works include "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Buddha of Suburbia." He has received numerous awards for his contributions to literature and film. Here are 33 of his 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

Previous
1 (Current)
2
Next

Hanif Kureishi

Hanif Kureishi - Image

Photo: Nrbelex, CC BY-SA 2.5

Occupation: English Playwright
Born: December 5, 1954
Quotes count: 33
Wikipedia: Hanif Kureishi

Related authors

Zadie Smith 137

English Novelist

Roger Michell 6

English Actor

Stephen Frears 8

English Director

Jim Broadbent 23

American Actor

Salman Rushdie 397

American Novelist

Monica Ali 16

British Writer

Ian McEwan 129

British Author

V. S. Naipaul 121

Trinidadian Novelist

Kazuo Ishiguro 135

Japanese Author

Peter O'Toole 46

Irish Actor