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" If it's bathos you want - and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end - nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it's playing sport. "

Howard Jacobson

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" For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly. "

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" There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air. "

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" 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. "

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" Many a trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular. "

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

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" The day I don't attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn't care less what anyone thinks of his appearance - someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal. "

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" 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? "

Howard Jacobson

" Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged. "

Howard Jacobson

" I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" I've always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother's friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny. "

Howard Jacobson

" A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with. "

Howard Jacobson

" Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story. "

Howard Jacobson

" Literature is a house with many mansions. "

Howard Jacobson

" I've been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn't a good husband, but I wasn't a good anything then. Nowadays, I'm much kinder. "

Howard Jacobson

" Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing. "

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" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" Alone of prejudices, anti-Zionism is sacrosanct. How very dare we distinguish the motivation of one sort from another? Or question, in any instance, an anti-Zionist's good faith? In fact, what determines whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is the nature of it. "

Howard Jacobson

" One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves - before anyone else gets to do it. "

Howard Jacobson

" The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect. "

Howard Jacobson

" Poets are not meant to be in competition. "

Howard Jacobson

" It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't. "

Howard Jacobson

" As for 'Great Expectations', it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely? "

Howard Jacobson

" 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.' "

Howard Jacobson

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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. "

Howard Jacobson

" That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence. "

Howard Jacobson