Only Quotes by Howard Jacobson

8 Only quotes by Howard Jacobson

Jacobson’s literary humor often revolves around a single absurdity. In this brief collection, he distills that comedic focus into a handful of lines.

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Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.

Howard Jacobson

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When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote:…

Howard Jacobson

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Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print -…

Howard Jacobson

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A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with.

Howard Jacobson

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'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.

Howard Jacobson

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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…

Howard Jacobson

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It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement…

Howard Jacobson

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It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I…

Howard Jacobson

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More by Howard Jacobson

Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.

Howard Jacobson

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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

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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

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I was a 'reverence for life' man - 'see life steadily and see it whole' - in my days as a lecturer in English…

Howard Jacobson

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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

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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

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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

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Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it.

Howard Jacobson

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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

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“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

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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

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To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it.

Howard Jacobson

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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…

Howard Jacobson

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A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.

Howard Jacobson

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The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.

Howard Jacobson

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