185 Quotes by 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?

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.

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

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

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

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.

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.

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.

Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy.