Top 120 Hanif Kureishi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Like you, she will have been with other people, but I’ve got a feeling there’s something between you.”

— Hanif Kureishi

52. “You’re smart enough to recognize that the subjects of migraines and cats never fail with the women. Lead the old girl toward the mint tea.”

— Hanif Kureishi

53. “My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywhere. At night, when I’m not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I’ll have to give this thing up and write a novel.”

— Hanif Kureishi

54. “Talent might be a gift but it still has to be cultivated. The imagination is like a fire or furnace: it has to be stoked, fed and attended to. One thing sets another ablaze. Keep it going.”

— Hanif Kureishi

55. “The truth is a tattoo on your forehead. You can’t see it yourself. I am your mirror.”

— Hanif Kureishi

56. “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

57. “For him in India the British were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he’d made me feel that we couldn’t allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people. You couldn’t let the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be. They were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn.”

— Hanif Kureishi

58. “Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them.”

— Hanif Kureishi

59. “I’d send Eleanor a dignified note. Then I’d have to fall out of love with her. That was the rough part. Everything in life is organized around people falling in love with each other. Falling is easy; but no one tells you how to fall out of love. I didn’t know where to begin.”

— Hanif Kureishi

60. “Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game’s up.”

— Hanif Kureishi

61. “Sometimes he’d get home before the children were asleep, and carry them around on his back, kick balls with them, and tell them stories of pigs with spiders on their heads. Other times he would turn up late so he could have his wife make supper, and be free of the feeling that the kids were devouring his life.”

— Hanif Kureishi

62. “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

63. “NASSER: In this damn country that we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It’s all spread out and availble. That’s why I believe in England. You just have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system.”

— Hanif Kureishi

64. “People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities.”

— Hanif Kureishi

65. “This ghost of a mother had begun to ask him questions about who he was and who he truly loved. Was he capable of love?”

— Hanif Kureishi

66. “We are surviving, in this pleasant liberal enclave where people read and speak freely, on borrowed time. But for those not inside – the dispossessed of the world, the poor, the refugees and those forced into exile – existence is wasteland.”

— Hanif Kureishi

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

— Hanif Kureishi

68. “The best stories are the open ones, those you don’t quite understand.”

— Hanif Kureishi

69. “I’ve never had any desire to be good. I don’t like goodness particularly.”

— Hanif Kureishi

70. “Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.”

— Hanif Kureishi

71. “A monster is someone who’s being monstered.”

— Hanif Kureishi

72. “But what about ugly bastards? What about us? What about our rights to be kissed?”

— Hanif Kureishi

73. “Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living.”

— Hanif Kureishi

74. “I know you so well, and you’ll feel guilty, simplifying everything, putting the emphasis here or there according to your interest.”

— Hanif Kureishi

75. “Surely you’ve noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they’re not turned on by.”

— Hanif Kureishi

76. “But Harry wondered if he might be getting too old for the dispiriting adventure that seemed to inevitably accompany the need for human contact.”

— Hanif Kureishi

77. “My son, there may be a time when I explain these things to you, because there may be a time when I understand them.”

— Hanif Kureishi

78. “The world’s full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry – every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them.”

— Hanif Kureishi

79. “You know, when you end a relationship and say you fell out of love, you actually mean you were never really in love. The past is a river, not a statue.”

— Hanif Kureishi

80. “Harry had loved most of the arts long enough to know that artists had to be excused failings which would condemn the general population. The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price. Artists were allowed, indeed encouraged, to lead more libidinous lives on behalf of others who had, of necessity, to leave their jouissance, at the door while they worked.”

— Hanif Kureishi

81. “Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict.”

— Hanif Kureishi

82. “The madness of writing was the antidote to true madness.”

— Hanif Kureishi

83. “My pleasures disappeared with my vices.”

— Hanif Kureishi

84. “If there’s no sacrifice, there’s no love.”

— Hanif Kureishi

85. “But why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live, as if everybody else is inadequate? Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?”

— Hanif Kureishi

86. “I was falling in love with myself. Not that beauty, or life itself, means much if you’re in a room on your own. Heaven is other people.”

— Hanif Kureishi

87. “As it was, she always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where rick of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to work hard to fail in her world.”

— Hanif Kureishi

88. “I don’t like being left for long struggling with my dangerous self.”

— Hanif Kureishi

89. “The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.”

— Hanif Kureishi

90. “The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction.”

— Hanif Kureishi

91. “For those of you curious about the menu, I am drinking tear soup.”

— Hanif Kureishi

92. “Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions.”

— Hanif Kureishi

93. “I have a rule about no material being sacred.”

— Hanif Kureishi

94. “I’ve said before, Harry, no need to hide your light,” said Alice, squeezing his hand. She giggled, “Dance, monkey, dance.”

— Hanif Kureishi

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

— Hanif Kureishi

96. “If you want to know a man, see how he is in love.”

— Hanif Kureishi

97. “Artists were allowed, indeed encouraged, to lead more libidinous lives on behalf of others who had, of necessity, to leave their jouissance at the door while they worked.”

— Hanif Kureishi

98. “The immigrant is the Everyman of the twentieth century.”

— Hanif Kureishi

99. “He had some impression that happiness was beyond him and everything was coming down, and that life could not be grasped but only lived.”

— Hanif Kureishi

100. “The point is, Harry, if I’m not to find you abhorrent, there will have to be more reciprocity all round. Particularly from your side.”

— Hanif Kureishi