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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. "

Howard Jacobson

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Love is a brainworm. "

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

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

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

" Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British. "

Howard Jacobson

" I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that. "

Howard Jacobson

" Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with. "

Howard Jacobson

" Literature is a house with many mansions. "

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

" 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

" I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite. "

Howard Jacobson

" That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing? "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

" You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" Poets are not meant to be in competition. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" Certainly a curtain has never fallen too soon for me. Every play is too long, even the short ones. Every concert, every film, every television programme the same. "

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

" As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down. "

Howard Jacobson