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" Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. "

Howard Jacobson

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" To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else. "

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" If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of. "

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" If it's bathos you want - and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end - nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it's playing sport. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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. "

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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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" 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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" Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined. "

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" 'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate. "

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" 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. "

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

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" Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works. "

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" 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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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" You don't divorce simply because your spouse has a number of qualities you dislike and on occasions makes your life uncomfortable. If you are reasonable, you view divorce as a measure of last resort. There are many steps you can take in the meantime. You might even call in a trained mediator. "

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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've always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother's friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny. "

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" Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party. "

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" 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.' "

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" You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere. "

Howard Jacobson

" To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'. "

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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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" 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. "

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" Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan. "

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

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" Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story. "

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" 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. "

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" I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself. "

Howard Jacobson