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" I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that. "

Howard Jacobson

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" There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month - I've no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when - fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order - well in order, I presume - to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning. "

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" I am enthralled until the last ball Djokovic hits, and the moment it is over and he is on his knees eating grass, I sink into my chair, cannot believe I have spent another fleeting fortnight of the few summers I have left caring about the outcome of contests I will have forgotten in the blink of an eye, and begin to question my sanity. "

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

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" Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British. "

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" As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down. "

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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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" 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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" 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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" The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto. "

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" Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised. "

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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 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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" The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism. "

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" Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair. "

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" 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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" With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it. "

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" 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? "

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

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" Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children. "

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" I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite. "

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" Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. "

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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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" You won't get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won't get a reasoned account of the joys of being 'linked' from somebody who's already 'in.' "

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" Literature is a house with many mansions. "

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" 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. "

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" What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities. "

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" You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness. "

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" Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving. "

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" If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of. "

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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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