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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 queens - is a question I don't expect ever to be solved. "

Howard Jacobson

Donald Trump

Beauty

Words

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" A book isn't noise to drown out other noise. "

" 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 have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief. "

" You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was. "

" You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do. "

" Rejection is the one constant of human experience. "

" I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were. "

Howard Jacobson

Myself

University

" I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people. "

" Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial. "

" 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 he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company. "

" Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia. "

Howard Jacobson

I Am

Nostalgia

" 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. "

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

" One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow. "

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

Howard Jacobson

Why

Everything

" Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love? "

Howard Jacobson

Everyone

Believe

" I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert. "

" Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely? "

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

" Politically it's easy to salve one's conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again. "

" I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you. "

" 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. "

" I should have conceived the idea for 'The Mighty Walzer' earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player - shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that. "

" I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them. "

" One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves - before anyone else gets to do it. "

" Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. "

" When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism. "

" Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged. "