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

Howard Jacobson

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" It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears. "

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" Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour. "

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" You don't have to be in pursuit of a body beautiful to wish yourself to be the flexuously willowy creature you once were or, failing that, just to be able to pick up something you have dropped. "

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" 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. "

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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 had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were. "

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" 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. "

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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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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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" Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works. "

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" There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest. "

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

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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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" I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport. "

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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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" For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now. "

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" A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession. "

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" 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. "

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" There's a lot to be said for misanthropy. "

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

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" If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly. "

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

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" In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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" Literature is a house with many mansions. "

Howard Jacobson