Desire Quote by Hanif Kureishi

““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.””

Hanif Kureishi

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Desire Safe place

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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.

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I've never had any desire to be good. I don't like goodness particularly.

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Harvey [Weinstein] didn't want to release [MY SON THE FANATIC]; he held it for two years because he wanted a happy ending, although I…

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“Starenje nije za slabice.”

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“Ali isto tako sam i shvatio da prestupnistvo samo ucvrscuje pravila koja pokusava da prekrsi. Nista ne osnazuje normu kao odstupanje od nje.”

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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…

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

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I guess writing is a kind of therapy in the sense that there are things you need to say and you say them, and…

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What a quality of innocence people have when they don't expect to be harmed.

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“People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about…

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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…

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“Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from the bottom of your stomach and to see your parents as equals, but within five minutes your intentions are blown to hell, and you're babbling…

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Explore all 129 Hanif Kureishi quotes

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Passion is what you need to be good, an unforgiving passion.

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I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is…

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Ye youths and virgins, when your generous blood Has drunk the warmth of fifteen summers, now The loves invite; now to new rapture wakes…

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I have observed this in my experience of slavery, - that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is…

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On the brink of being satiated, desire still appears infinite.

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If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the…

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He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he held her tightly unconscious of what he was doing. He held her up, though tottering himself. He felt as if his head were filled with smoke; flashes of light slipped through his eyelids; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act, and…

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Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three [great teachers] did not…

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“The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.”

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In discovering books, you became free to explore the full range of human motives, desires, secrets, and lies. All my life, people have scolded me for having an excess of feeling, saying that I was too sensitive - as if one could be in danger from feeling too much instead of too little. But my outsize emotions were well represented…

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