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

Howard Jacobson

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" 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. "

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" No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish. "

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" 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. "

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" A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with. "

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" 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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" Rejection is the one constant of human experience. "

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" The day I don't attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn't care less what anyone thinks of his appearance - someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal. "

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" 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. "

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" Politically it's easy to salve one's conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again. "

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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 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? "

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" A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession. "

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" 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. "

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

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" Literature is a house with many mansions. "

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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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" Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. "

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" 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

" 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

" The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief. "

Howard Jacobson

" Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia. "

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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. "

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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've been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn't a good husband, but I wasn't a good anything then. Nowadays, I'm much kinder. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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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. "

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" In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next. "

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