“Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you’d just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding ‘Keep smiling – Fyodor.’”
― Howard Jacobson
“Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Rejection is the one constant of human experience.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Where there are no spectators, there is no sponsorship. Where there is no sponsorship, there is no money. Where there is no money, there are no officials with fingers in the pot. The lesson to be learnt from this is simple. If we want honest sport, we have to stop watching it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I am happiest now. There’s nothing like running out of time to make you realise you’re in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You don’t remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them.”
― Howard Jacobson
“To be clear, I abhor the separation wall. It is an eyesore in itself and makes tangible the failed diplomacy and cruel short-sightedness that causes such misery in the region. No Palestinian can see that wall and not wonder if the Israelis mean it to stay there forever, a constant reminder of what they never intend to change.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I’ve never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again.”
― Howard Jacobson
“No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller ever gets to a more wonderful place.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That’s at the heart of ‘J’, a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in ‘J,’ there’s a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?”
― Howard Jacobson
“You don’t have to believe the electorate secretly hankers for a dose of Marxist-Leninism to accept that there are deep levels of justified bitterness out there waiting to be tapped.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of ‘American Pastoral’ – to imagine the impact on a good man of America’s fall from the family decencies of the ’30s and ’40s to the self-centred violence of the ’60s – outstrips anything Sabbath’s Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer’s mind.”
― Howard Jacobson
“As for ‘Great Expectations’, it is up there for me with the world’s greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There is much that makes one pause in ‘If This is a Man’, the record of Levi’s 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Things happen in ‘If This is a Man’ that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in ‘King Lear’, or Conrad in ‘The Heart of Darkness’.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided.”
― Howard Jacobson
“That’s the great test: if you’re going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you’ve got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?”
― Howard Jacobson
“The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“We shouldn’t be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan.”
― Howard Jacobson
“No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there’s an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence’s taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis’s, but you would still not call her hellish.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There’s a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The terrorist isn’t a problem because he doesn’t conform; he’s a problem because he does. It’s what he conforms to that makes him dangerous.”
― Howard Jacobson
“For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The day I don’t attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of his appearance – someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn’t a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Politically it’s easy to salve one’s conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again.”
― Howard Jacobson
“What isn’t for everybody shouldn’t be for anybody: the world’s opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Sometimes, a writer’s life alone can tell a story.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.”
― Howard Jacobson
“As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It’s important to get your operas right.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences – for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal – Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don’t have Italian tailors we can spare here.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There’s a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men’s nostalgia.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let’s just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears.”
― Howard Jacobson
“To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Certainly a curtain has never fallen too soon for me. Every play is too long, even the short ones. Every concert, every film, every television programme the same.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Let’s be honest with one another: almost everything is too long except life, and I know people who wouldn’t even concur with that exception.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It’s a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don’t.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The young come in many guises: vigorous and passionate, vindictive and mean-spirited. And not every person over 65 is dozing in a retirement home.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It’s not only teenagers who think they look good in pre-holed jeans, and I doubt it’s only the superannuated who are amused by Ant and Dec.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Alone of prejudices, anti-Zionism is sacrosanct. How very dare we distinguish the motivation of one sort from another? Or question, in any instance, an anti-Zionist’s good faith? In fact, what determines whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is the nature of it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Sensitivity doesn’t necessarily make you easy to get on with.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There’s more than one way of being brutal.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I’d vandalised and now limit myself to ‘Good wishes.’”
― Howard Jacobson
“It’s a weakness of mine to forget what it is I’ve just been talking about so that when people make witty allusions to it, I stare at them open-mouthed, not knowing what they’re talking about.”
― Howard Jacobson
“A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.”
― Howard Jacobson
“In anticipation of a meal – supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant – we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I am enthralled until the last ball Djokovic hits, and the moment it is over and he is on his knees eating grass, I sink into my chair, cannot believe I have spent another fleeting fortnight of the few summers I have left caring about the outcome of contests I will have forgotten in the blink of an eye, and begin to question my sanity.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If it’s bathos you want – and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end – nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it’s playing sport.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You don’t have to be in pursuit of a body beautiful to wish yourself to be the flexuously willowy creature you once were or, failing that, just to be able to pick up something you have dropped.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me ã2,000 a year to amble on a treadmill for half an hour a week and sit and read Grazia in the cooling-off area.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Looking back, I realise it wasn’t only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn’t knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn’t they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them?”
― Howard Jacobson
“You cannot exercise and be amused about it. You cannot integrate the dying bug into your core workout and hold to the position that you are a spiritual being. In this way, the body and the mind are each other’s opposite unto death, which is why you have to choose which of them you are going to follow.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Maybe we’d forgotten what socialists are meant to look and sound like. Well, now we’ve been reminded. They’re meant to look and sound like Jeremy Corbyn.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I like a singalong. And I’m a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month – I’ve no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when – fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order – well in order, I presume – to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There’s a lot to be said for misanthropy.”
― Howard Jacobson
“This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up ‘Steppenwolf,’ and you’ll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ, and you’ll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you’ll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Sometimes it’s best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You won’t get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won’t get a reasoned account of the joys of being ‘linked’ from somebody who’s already ‘in.’”
― Howard Jacobson
“Even the wordiest of men know there’s a time to button it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.”
― Howard Jacobson
“A book isn’t noise to drown out other noise.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Love is a brainworm.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I won’t go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If the great thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone, the bad thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It isn’t only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated – and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence – but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If you want a good life, don’t succeed at anything too early or too well. And don’t choose a profession that attracts money or attention. The minute people want to see you doing what you do, you’re finished.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Poets are not meant to be in competition.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another – humanity is one big cheat – but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome’s rigged.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I wouldn’t dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf – which aren’t truly sports anyway.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention.”
― Howard Jacobson
“A healthy culture doesn’t memorialise only those it agrees with.”
― Howard Jacobson
“That a nation’s statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn’t at all imply a continuing reverence.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of ‘Middlemarch’ in his back pocket?”
― Howard Jacobson
“When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You can imprison but you can’t enslave a man who argues with his books.”
― Howard Jacobson
“A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There’s no law that says you have to be consistent in your preferences.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself – indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard – but because the line ‘to thine own self be true’ was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Don’t imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Failing to see the point is not a virtue.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author’s job to point it out.”
― Howard Jacobson
“’J’ is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can’t believe that everyone in the world doesn’t love them. What is there not to love?”
― Howard Jacobson
“Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn’t writing what I believed. I’m not interested in what I believe.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, ‘You are trying to silence us.’ I don’t deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing.”
― Howard Jacobson
“’Legality’ is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.”
― Howard Jacobson
“People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn’t funny at all. It’s appalling and tragic.”
― Howard Jacobson
“When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market.”
― Howard Jacobson
“One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves – before anyone else gets to do it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I’ve always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it’s the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It’s anger-making.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There mustn’t be a moment when we turn on the TV and think, ‘There’s Trump in the White House’ – that must never feel normal.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I wouldn’t suppose for one moment that there’s a single one of Trump’s voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion, and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people’s opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I’ve never owned a T-shirt. I don’t like vests or sweaters or cardies with zips. I like a proper shirt with a collar. There’s nothing else that I think I look nice in. I don’t think there’s anything else that other men look nice in, to be honest. Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I’ve always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert.”
― Howard Jacobson
“One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling.”
― Howard Jacobson
“As soon as I finished ‘The Finkler Question,’ I was in despair. I’d changed my English publisher because they’d been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn’t like it. The Canadian publisher didn’t like it… I’d been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I’ve always felt as much outside the Jewish experience as in it. It astonished my family that I wrote about things Jewish.”
― Howard Jacobson
“When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, ‘I can’t stand this’. Then I’d meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I’d think, ‘Hang on’. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject.”
― Howard Jacobson
“When I see ultra-Orthodox Jews stamping all over Jaffa, or when I see them deciding who is a Jew, I think: ‘What’s happened to the grand dream of Zionism?’ I don’t like to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. What’s wrong with Manchester?”
― Howard Jacobson
“My mother’s side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people’s excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I’ve been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn’t a good husband, but I wasn’t a good anything then. Nowadays, I’m much kinder.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I’ve always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother’s friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny.”
― Howard Jacobson
“As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I’m an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line – it’s George Eliot, it’s Dickens, it’s Dr. Johnson, it’s Jane Austen.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish – the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn’t go to synagogue. I’m frightened of synagogue to this day.”
― Howard Jacobson
“People keep saying you can’t satirize Trump because he’s beyond satire, but it’s not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that’s new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world – block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Nobody who’s thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn’t come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can’t just say, ‘Well, it’s the will of the people.’”
― Howard Jacobson
“In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.”
― Howard Jacobson
“For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn’t move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days.”
― Howard Jacobson
“When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket – a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney – the world was all before me.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Trump’s hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift.”
― Howard Jacobson
“How Donald Trump has come so far with so few words – how he even managed to keep up conversationally with all those beauty queens – is a question I don’t expect ever to be solved.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The ‘Reader’s Digest’ used to run a feature called ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ The new wisdom – post-Trump and Brexit – is that it doesn’t.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary.”
― Howard Jacobson
“One should take writers’ valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I should have conceived the idea for ‘The Mighty Walzer’ earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player – shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that.”
― Howard Jacobson
“A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You don’t divorce simply because your spouse has a number of qualities you dislike and on occasions makes your life uncomfortable. If you are reasonable, you view divorce as a measure of last resort. There are many steps you can take in the meantime. You might even call in a trained mediator.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Think of the aged and bed-ridden Matisse cutting out strips of coloured paper, much as a child might, and investing them with a more than mortal vitality… Those strips of paper resonate because they prove that our materials don’t determine in advance the worth of what we make.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Rereading one’s own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print – ‘The Very Model of a Man’ is the only novel of mine that has – and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Many a trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don’t act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it’s always possible he was more anxious than he let on.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children.”
― Howard Jacobson
“To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else.”
― Howard Jacobson
“To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Literature is a house with many mansions.”
― Howard Jacobson
“’Great Expectations’, in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives club could ever be.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I was a ‘reverence for life’ man – ‘see life steadily and see it whole’ – in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly ‘saved’ by reading, at least partially ‘repaired’ by it: made the better morally and existentially.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it’s literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What’s at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.”
― Howard Jacobson
“If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words ‘Never Forget’ become irksome eventually.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Again and again, Primo Levi’s work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn’t.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Show me a novel that’s not comic, and I’ll show you a novel that’s not doing its job.”
― Howard Jacobson
“To my ear, the term ‘comic novelist’ is as redundant and off-putting as the term ‘literary novelist’.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don’t recognise, an attitude that doesn’t accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don’t get or of which they don’t approve.”
― Howard Jacobson
“For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can’t agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.”
― Howard Jacobson
“With ‘J’, at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn’t reneging on it; I just didn’t want to do it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was.”
― Howard Jacobson
“’Family Guy’. It’s not only the funniest programme on television, it’s the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I’ve been trying hard to follow ever since.”
― Howard Jacobson
“It’s always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you’re glad when you get it.”
― Howard Jacobson
“There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools… They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I always, always wanted to be a writer.”
― Howard Jacobson
“The magic word ‘Shakespeare’ always freezes you in your chair.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I have a son, but I’ve never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting.”
― Howard Jacobson
“Shakespeare’s always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he’s who I hear all the time. And he’s almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don’t know who he is.”
― Howard Jacobson
“I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he’s so different from that.”
― Howard Jacobson
Leave a Reply