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" Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic. "
Howard Jacobson
Culture
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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 to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author's job to point it out. "
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" The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own. "
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" 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. "
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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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" It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement. "
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" 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. "
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" When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was. "
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" Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose. "
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" The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it. "
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" '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. "
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" 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. "
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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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" We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. "
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" A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with. "
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" You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do. "
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" 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. "
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" Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story. "
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