The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Hanif Kureishi

When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn’t find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End.

paris, victor-hugo, west-end, whore

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

beautiful, clothes, women

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.

conscience, guilt, morality, puberty

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

Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks … Or Eric Gill’s copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes’s lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan … Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen.

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.

artists, bad-review, writers

Desire is naughty and doesn’t conform to our ideals, which is why we have such a need of them. Desire mocks all human endeavour and makes it worthwhile. Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent – no wonder people want it arrested and kept in a safe place. And just when we think we’ve got desire under control it lets us down or fills us with hope. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all.

The past looks worse the closer you look at it.

Yes, Eleanor loathed herself and yet required praise, which she then never believed.

narcissism, praise, self-esteem, self-loathing

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

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.

failure, wealth

Security and safety were the reward of dullness.