The Last Word Quotes

“One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“If you want to know a man, see how he is in love.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“The best stories are the open ones, those you don’t quite understand.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“There’s a lot of degradation in sex, isn’t there?”
“When it’s done right.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“The “master” would always be the one who could wait without anxiety;”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn’t give.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“I know you so well, and you’ll feel guilty, simplifying everything, putting the emphasis here or there according to your interest.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“The truth is a tattoo on your forehead. You can’t see it yourself. I am your mirror.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“Mutual transformation is rare, as good things are. In my view, a person should live as they wish until they find someone they want to be faithful to. After all, as you say, one can’t suck oneself off.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“If there’s no sacrifice, there’s no love.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“He was, after all, just a man. And not merely a narrative.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“It is only the insane who achieve anything significant.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“Clothes and accessories were a person’s creativity; how someone looked was always a free decision, like a brushstroke on a painting.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“A man who hasn’t left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word

“Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“Does sex make life worth living? Didn’t you say, the other day, ‘Our lives are only as good as our orgasms’?”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“Beauty is the promise of happiness . . .”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that’s where to head, boy.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel

“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, The Last Word: A Novel

“That’s where the public like their artists—exposed, trousers down, arse up, doing a long stretch among serial killers, and shitting in front of strangers. That’ll teach ’em to think their talent makes them better than mediocre no-brain tax-paying wage slaves like us.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word: A Novel