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" 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. "

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" 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.' "

Howard Jacobson

Good

Myself

Money

" The terrorist isn't a problem because he doesn't conform; he's a problem because he does. It's what he conforms to that makes him dangerous. "

Howard Jacobson

Him

Problem

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next. "

" If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it. "

" Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job. "

" 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. "

" Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary. "

" I've never owned a T-shirt. I don't like vests or sweaters or cardies with zips. I like a proper shirt with a collar. There's nothing else that I think I look nice in. I don't think there's anything else that other men look nice in, to be honest. Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with. "

" 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. "

" To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it. "

Howard Jacobson

Philosopher

Jew

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

" When I see ultra-Orthodox Jews stamping all over Jaffa, or when I see them deciding who is a Jew, I think: 'What's happened to the grand dream of Zionism?' I don't like to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. What's wrong with Manchester? "

" Poets are not meant to be in competition. "

" There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools... They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding. "

Howard Jacobson

Lawyers

Question

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

People

Writing

" That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing? "

" 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. "

" The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually. "

" I always, always wanted to be a writer. "

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

" If the great thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone, the bad thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone. "

" Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with. "

" Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined. "

" Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last. "

Howard Jacobson

Stories

Years

" 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. "

" No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish. "

" It's not only teenagers who think they look good in pre-holed jeans, and I doubt it's only the superannuated who are amused by Ant and Dec. "

" 'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate. "