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" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

Right Person

Time

Skin

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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. "

" I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further. "

" 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. "

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" Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up. "

Howard Jacobson

Hard

Left

" 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. "

" To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'. "

" 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 small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest. "

" I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things. "

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

" It's a weakness of mine to forget what it is I've just been talking about so that when people make witty allusions to it, I stare at them open-mouthed, not knowing what they're talking about. "

" Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference. "

" Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I'd vandalised and now limit myself to 'Good wishes.' "

" When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market. "

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

Howard Jacobson

Why

Everything

" I wouldn't suppose for one moment that there's a single one of Trump's voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs. "

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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. "

" Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money. "

" Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour. "