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" If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them. "

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" I've always felt as much outside the Jewish experience as in it. It astonished my family that I wrote about things Jewish. "

Howard Jacobson

Outside

Family

Experience

" One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow. "

" Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous. "

" I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you. "

" Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Fit

Where

" I wouldn't suppose for one moment that there's a single one of Trump's voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs. "

" 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. "

" Think of the aged and bed-ridden Matisse cutting out strips of coloured paper, much as a child might, and investing them with a more than mortal vitality... Those strips of paper resonate because they prove that our materials don't determine in advance the worth of what we make. "

" 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. "

" I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert. "

" The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about. "

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

" 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. "

" Looking back, I realise it wasn't only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn't knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn't they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them? "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket? "

" There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month - I've no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when - fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order - well in order, I presume - to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning. "

" Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan. "

" Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference. "

" When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism. "

" 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. "

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