Top 120 Hanif Kureishi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don’t want it badly enough, you make excuses.”

— Hanif Kureishi

2. “Dear God, teach me to be careless.”

— Hanif Kureishi

3. “And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.”

— Hanif Kureishi

4. “Who doesn’t love cock?”

— Hanif Kureishi

5. “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

6. “I am dust and my story ends here.”

— Hanif Kureishi

7. “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

8. “You don’t stop loving someone just because you hate them.”

— Hanif Kureishi

9. “Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy.”

— Hanif Kureishi

10. “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

11. “What a quality of innocence people have when they don’t expect to be harmed.”

— Hanif Kureishi

12. “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

13. “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

14. “It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.”

— Hanif Kureishi

15. “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

16. “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.”

— Hanif Kureishi

17. “The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price.”

— Hanif Kureishi

18. “Nothing consoles like the blues.”

— Hanif Kureishi

19. “I don’t want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.”

— Hanif Kureishi

20. “How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.”

— Hanif Kureishi

21. “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...”

— Hanif Kureishi

22. “Being in love means being at the mercy of someone’s childhood.”

— Hanif Kureishi

23. “Security and safety were the reward of dullness.”

— Hanif Kureishi

24. “Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.”

— Hanif Kureishi

25. “One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood.”

— Hanif Kureishi

26. “Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.”

— Hanif Kureishi

27. “London seemed like a house with five thousand rooms, all different; the kick was to work out how they connected, and eventually to walk through all of them.”

— Hanif Kureishi

28. “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.”

— Hanif Kureishi

29. “Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind.”

— Hanif Kureishi

30. “One day everything changed. In the morning things were one way and by bedtime another. I was seventeen.”

— Hanif Kureishi

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Hanif Kureishi

34. “But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.”

— Hanif Kureishi

35. “Love cannot be measured by its duration...”

— Hanif Kureishi

36. “No amount of promises can guarantee love.”

— Hanif Kureishi

37. “The interesting people you wanted to be with – their minds were unusual, you saw things freshly with them and all was not deadness and repetition.”

— Hanif Kureishi

38. “I’m interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.”

— Hanif Kureishi

39. “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.”

— Hanif Kureishi

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

— Hanif Kureishi

41. “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.”

— Hanif Kureishi

42. “Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted.”

— Hanif Kureishi

43. “For him, the writer should be the very devil, a disturber of dreams and wrecker of fatuous utopias, the bringer-in of reality, and rival of God in his wish to make worlds.”

— Hanif Kureishi

44. “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.”

— Hanif Kureishi

45. “Mutual transformation is rare, as good things are. In my view, a person should live as they wish until they find someone they want to be faithful to. After all, as you say, one can’t suck oneself off.”

— Hanif Kureishi

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

— Hanif Kureishi

47. “At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins.”

— Hanif Kureishi

48. “Of course, when you love the unwell, you constantly have to ask yourself: Do I love her, or her illness? Am I her lover or her healer?”

— Hanif Kureishi

49. “Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that’s where to head, boy.”

— Hanif Kureishi

50. “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?”

— Hanif Kureishi