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

Howard Jacobson

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" 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

" I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them. "

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" Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them. "

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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've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing. "

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

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

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" When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" I was a 'reverence for life' man - 'see life steadily and see it whole' - in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly 'saved' by reading, at least partially 'repaired' by it: made the better morally and existentially. "

Howard Jacobson

" The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair. "

Howard Jacobson

" Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job. "

Howard Jacobson

" There mustn't be a moment when we turn on the TV and think, 'There's Trump in the White House' - that must never feel normal. "

Howard Jacobson

" Literature is a house with many mansions. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. "

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

" There's a lot to be said for misanthropy. "

Howard Jacobson

" Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" When I see ultra-Orthodox Jews stamping all over Jaffa, or when I see them deciding who is a Jew, I think: 'What's happened to the grand dream of Zionism?' I don't like to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. What's wrong with Manchester? "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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