Top 120 Hanif Kureishi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “He felt like a criminal, though the only laws he’d broken were his own, and he wasn’t sure which ones they were.”

— Hanif Kureishi

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

— Hanif Kureishi

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

— Hanif Kureishi

104. “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

105. “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

106. “I’ve learned that unfeeling, bloodsucking men like you need to reduce women to manageable cliches, even to destroy them, for the sake of control.”

— Hanif Kureishi

107. “She screamed – more like a week. She informed me that a woman who doesn’t have an orgasm a day will get dry skin, and lines. According to her you should rub your lover’s semen into your forehead.”

— Hanif Kureishi

108. “Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn’t give.”

— Hanif Kureishi

109. “The questions had become: What can we forgive in others? How far do they have to go before we lose faith in them?”

— Hanif Kureishi

110. “You see people truly when they enjoy the most.”

— Hanif Kureishi

111. “Is she always elusive?” “Her whole life’s a no-show.”

— Hanif Kureishi

112. “I love the razor’s edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can’t bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.”

— Hanif Kureishi

113. “Most people don’t know how to maximise their pleasure, they sexualise their pain. 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

114. “I’ve said it’s over for the white races, an obvious truth which caused much agitation amongst the journalists. The rich will rule as usual; they come in all colours, particularly yellow.”

— Hanif Kureishi

115. “But to be able to bear one’s own mind, to wait while the inner storm of intolerable thoughts blows itself out, leaving one to contemplate the debris with some understanding – that is an enviable state of mind.”

— Hanif Kureishi

116. “Most people don’t know how to maximize their pleasure, Harry, they sexualize their pain.”

— Hanif Kureishi

117. “I can’t quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another – me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority – which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.”

— Hanif Kureishi

118. “Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God’s fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page.”

— Hanif Kureishi

119. “The mad were put in asylums, but the sane are worse off in their offices.”

— Hanif Kureishi

120. “Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient.”

— Hanif Kureishi

121. “After a bit you realize there’s only one invaluable commodity. Not gold or love, but time.”

— Hanif Kureishi

122. “Harry had loved most of the arts long enough to know that artists had to be excused failings which would condemn the general population.”

— Hanif Kureishi

123. “He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes.”

— Hanif Kureishi

124. “The “master” would always be the one who could wait without anxiety;.”

— Hanif Kureishi

125. “And if anyone manages to get their sexuality and their love lined up together, they are indeed lucky. It is as rare as a fine spring day in the country.”

— Hanif Kureishi

126. “You’re one of those old-fashioned, romantic men for whom women aren’t really there unless you decide we are.”

— Hanif Kureishi

127. “After seeing it work for so long, I began to perceive Charlie’s charm as a method of robbing houses by persuading the owners to invite you in and take their possessions. I was in no doubt: it was robbery; there were objects of yours he wanted. And he took them. It was false and manipulative and I admired it tremendously.”

— Hanif Kureishi

128. “A man who hasn’t left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive.”

— Hanif Kureishi

129. “How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?”

— Hanif Kureishi

130. “Because it is about that which we can’t be prepared for – the great test we men have passed before, but have no way of knowing we will pass again.”

— Hanif Kureishi

131. “My father had the right idea. Begin from an assumption of insanity and then laugh, where possible.”

— Hanif Kureishi

132. “Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.”

— Hanif Kureishi

133. “It is only the insane who achieve anything significant.”

— Hanif Kureishi

134. “He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.”

— Hanif Kureishi

135. “A few words of criticism and I can bear a grudge for three days at a time, convinced she is plotting against me. None of this has diminished despite years of self-analysis, therapy and “writing as healing”, as some of my students used to call the attempt to make at. Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to. If you asked me, I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas. I’d better enjoy them, then.”

— Hanif Kureishi

136. “However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile – such innocence in the way he wanted to understand me, and such possibility of pain, along with the implicit assumption that he wouldn’t be harmed – that I pulled away.”

— Hanif Kureishi

137. “One day we are children, our faces are bright and open. We want to know how machines work. We are in love with polar bears. The next day we’re throwing ourselves down the stairs, drunk and weeping. Our lives are over. We hate life and we hate death.”

— Hanif Kureishi

138. “Transgression affirms the very rules it intends to flout. Nothing supports the norm like deviation.”

— Hanif Kureishi

139. “Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness.”

— Hanif Kureishi