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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. "

Howard Jacobson

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" There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional. "

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" 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

" 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

" Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one. "

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

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability. "

Howard Jacobson

" Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" Rejection is the one constant of human experience. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" My mother's side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people's excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me. "

Howard Jacobson

" You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was. "

Howard Jacobson

" There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

" 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

" I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy. "

Howard Jacobson

" I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway. "

Howard Jacobson

" Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now. "

Howard Jacobson

" That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket - a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney - the world was all before me. "

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