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" It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it. "
Howard Jacobson
Prize
Always
You
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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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World
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Free
" You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last. "
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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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" 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
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Matters
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" Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last. "
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Stories
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Years
" A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even. "
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Play
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" Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. "
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Most
Been
Whom
" 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. "
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Body
Mind
Spiritual
" Love is a brainworm. "
Howard Jacobson
Love
Love Is
" Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. "
Howard Jacobson
Will
Higher
Fall
" The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy. "
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Hate
Stop
Music
" Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional. "
Howard Jacobson
Time
Fate
Day
" 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
" This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up 'Steppenwolf,' and you'll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ, and you'll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you'll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network. "
Howard Jacobson
Princess
You
Band
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Reading
True
Be True
" 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? "
Howard Jacobson
Looking Back
Looking
Knowledge
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Socialism
Church
Devil
" 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
World
Attitude
You
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Right Person
Time
Skin
" The young come in many guises: vigorous and passionate, vindictive and mean-spirited. And not every person over 65 is dozing in a retirement home. "
Howard Jacobson
Young
Retirement
Passionate
" I should have conceived the idea for 'The Mighty Walzer' earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player - shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that. "
Howard Jacobson
Winning
Women
Beautiful
" If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it. "
Howard Jacobson
Know
First
Want
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Rise
Rest
Small
" I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day. "
Howard Jacobson
Day
New
New York
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Wisdom
New
Power
" Where there are no spectators, there is no sponsorship. Where there is no sponsorship, there is no money. Where there is no money, there are no officials with fingers in the pot. The lesson to be learnt from this is simple. If we want honest sport, we have to stop watching it. "
Howard Jacobson
Simple
Lesson
Money
" Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one. "
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Yourself
You
Way
" It's a weakness of mine to forget what it is I've just been talking about so that when people make witty allusions to it, I stare at them open-mouthed, not knowing what they're talking about. "
Howard Jacobson
Talking
Weakness
Not Knowing
" Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.' "
Howard Jacobson
Finding
You
Smiling
" 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
People
Writing
Me