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" If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice. "

Howard Jacobson

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. "

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" I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket - a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney - the world was all before me. "

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" I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people. "

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" Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't. "

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" I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that. "

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" 'Great Expectations', in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives club could ever be. "

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" Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it. "

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" Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving. "

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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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" As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down. "

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" You cannot exercise and be amused about it. You cannot integrate the dying bug into your core workout and hold to the position that you are a spiritual being. In this way, the body and the mind are each other's opposite unto death, which is why you have to choose which of them you are going to follow. "

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. "

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" I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy. "

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

Howard Jacobson

" It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge. "

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

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

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" 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.' "

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" 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? "

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" What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities. "

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" 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. "

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" The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto. "

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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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" There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional. "

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