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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. "

Howard Jacobson

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" You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was. "

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" Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided. "

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" Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that's new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world - block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary. "

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" 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. "

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

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" When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy. "

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" When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment. "

Howard Jacobson

" Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

" When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" You don't have to believe the electorate secretly hankers for a dose of Marxist-Leninism to accept that there are deep levels of justified bitterness out there waiting to be tapped. "

Howard Jacobson

" I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

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

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" Love is a brainworm. "

Howard Jacobson

" Let's be honest with one another: almost everything is too long except life, and I know people who wouldn't even concur with that exception. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books. "

Howard Jacobson