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" I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me £2,000 a year to amble on a treadmill for half an hour a week and sit and read Grazia in the cooling-off area. "
Howard Jacobson
Health
Me
Week
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" Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic. "
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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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People
Writing
Me
" For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly. "
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Own
Go
Great
" Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees. "
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Trees
Wood
You
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Want
Comedy
Deep
" Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided. "
Howard Jacobson
Will
Dissent
Passionate
" Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional. "
Howard Jacobson
Time
Fate
Day
" Maybe we'd forgotten what socialists are meant to look and sound like. Well, now we've been reminded. They're meant to look and sound like Jeremy Corbyn. "
Howard Jacobson
Look
Now
Like
" The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect. "
Howard Jacobson
Humour
Wit
Right
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Young
Retirement
Passionate
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Writing
Country
Best
" Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined. "
Howard Jacobson
Determined
Nothing
Finished
" I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion, and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people's opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity. "
Howard Jacobson
Think
Words
Writing
" Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party. "
Howard Jacobson
Party
Work
Imagination
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
People
Mother
Me
" If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket? "
Howard Jacobson
Power
Literature
Doubt
" There's no law that says you have to be consistent in your preferences. "
Howard Jacobson
Says
You
No Law
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Beliefs
Single
Would
" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. "
Howard Jacobson
Believe
Argument
Jew
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Believe
I Am
Moment
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Writing
I Believe
Believe
" You don't divorce simply because your spouse has a number of qualities you dislike and on occasions makes your life uncomfortable. If you are reasonable, you view divorce as a measure of last resort. There are many steps you can take in the meantime. You might even call in a trained mediator. "
Howard Jacobson
View
You
Measure
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Heart
Fear
Hate
" Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it. "
Howard Jacobson
Know
Time
Men
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Reading
Alone
Personality
" I've always felt as much outside the Jewish experience as in it. It astonished my family that I wrote about things Jewish. "
Howard Jacobson
Outside
Family
Experience
" People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words. "
Howard Jacobson
Saying
Walk
People
" Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. "
Howard Jacobson
Against
Many
Spirit
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Denial
Israel
False
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Wisdom
New
Power