You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal.… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical? — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Many a trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print -… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
“Art is made by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn’t art. And of course it is loved as… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource.… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.' — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don't act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
As for 'Great Expectations', it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Looking back, I realise it wasn't only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn't knowledge I objected… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
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… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
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… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
I was a 'reverence for life' man - 'see life steadily and see it whole' - in my days as a lecturer in English… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
How Donald Trump has come so far with so few words - how he even managed to keep up conversationally with all those beauty… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
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… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
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… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
“Was he a bad man or just a foolish one? He didn't feel bad to himself. As a husband he believed himself to be… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
