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" Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. "

Howard Jacobson

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" Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" Failing to see the point is not a virtue. "

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" '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. "

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" I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport. "

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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 windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now. "

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" 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. "

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" The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since. "

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" 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. "

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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. "

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" If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly. "

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" Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story. "

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" Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided. "

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

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" 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. "

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" The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair. "

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" I've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing. "

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" 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. "

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" A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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

" 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

" 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

" Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them. "

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" 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. "

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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: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment. "

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