You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do. — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that. — 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
I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always… — 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
Let's be honest with one another: almost everything is too long except life, and I know people who wouldn't even concur with… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
It's a weakness of mine to forget what it is I've just been talking about so that when people make witty allusions… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, 'I can't stand this'. Then I'd meet somebody… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who… — Howard Jacobson Copy Share Image
Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from… — 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
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… — 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
