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" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Only
Good
Jeans
Related Quotes:
" The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism. "
Howard Jacobson
Nothing
Innocent
Jew
" Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I'd vandalised and now limit myself to 'Good wishes.' "
Howard Jacobson
Good
Myself
Money
" I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things. "
Howard Jacobson
Half
Best
Tennis
" What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities. "
Howard Jacobson
Everybody
Houses
Anybody
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Mother
Children
She
" Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'. "
Howard Jacobson
Experience
Daily
Man
" 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
" Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary. "
Howard Jacobson
Listening
Child
Speak
" The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy. "
Howard Jacobson
Hate
Stop
Music
" Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don't act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it's always possible he was more anxious than he let on. "
Howard Jacobson
Him
Literature
Story
" 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
" Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. "
Howard Jacobson
Most
Been
Whom
" You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books. "
Howard Jacobson
Books
You
Who
" Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love? "
Howard Jacobson
Everyone
Like
Believe
" Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making. "
Howard Jacobson
America
People
Words
" Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised. "
Howard Jacobson
Country
Vote
Matters
" 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
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Saying
Walk
People
" The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair. "
Howard Jacobson
Word
Always
Chair
" Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose. "
Howard Jacobson
Want
Leaves
Return
" To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'. "
Howard Jacobson
Ear
Literary
Redundant
" 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
" Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees. "
Howard Jacobson
Trees
Wood
You
" Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing. "
Howard Jacobson
Time
Silence
People
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Lawyers
Us
Question
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Spirit
Music
Way
" Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of 'American Pastoral' - to imagine the impact on a good man of America's fall from the family decencies of the '30s and '40s to the self-centred violence of the '60s - outstrips anything Sabbath's Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer's mind. "
Howard Jacobson
Fall
Family
Good
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Think
Prove
Child
" It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture. "
Howard Jacobson
Violence
Creative
Culture
" Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them. "
Howard Jacobson
You
Harm
Great