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" 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. "

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" A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even. "

Howard Jacobson

Play

Confidence

Even

" It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement. "

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

" You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere. "

" When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, 'I can't stand this'. Then I'd meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I'd think, 'Hang on'. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it. "

" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Howard Jacobson

Philosopher

Jew

" Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal. "

Howard Jacobson

Being

Hands

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

" Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees. "

" We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. "

" I never believe any politician talking about popular culture. "

" I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway. "

" The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion. "

" To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else. "

" Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius. "

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

" I was a 'reverence for life' man - 'see life steadily and see it whole' - in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly 'saved' by reading, at least partially 'repaired' by it: made the better morally and existentially. "

" Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.' "