Hanif Kureishi Quotes - Page 2

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?

...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.

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.

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.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

I am determined to live without illusions. I want to look at reality straight. Without hiding.

I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure.

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?

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

My guess is that she is uncomfortable in such an intransigent world but is unable to live accordingly to her own desire.

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.

Love cannot be measured by its duration.

I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.

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.

The cruellest thing you can do to Kerouac is reread him at thirty-eight.

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.

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.

If jealousy was the vindaloo of love, I'd imagined her tongue burning, and such a fire forcing her to spill her truth.

Children, who have yet to learn our ways, are notoriously promiscuous in their affection. They’ll sit on anyone’s knee.

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.

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?

No amount of promises can guarantee love

Like you, she will have been with other people, but I've got a feeling there's something between you.