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" Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up. "
Howard Jacobson
Up
Hard
Left
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" Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees. "
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Trees
Wood
You
" A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing. "
Howard Jacobson
Accepts
Thought
Thing
" 'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate. "
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Only
Guy
Family
" I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you. "
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Right Person
Time
Skin
" It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge. "
Howard Jacobson
Wise
Book
Challenge
" I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself. "
Howard Jacobson
Bit
Myself
Like
" It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement. "
Howard Jacobson
Achievement
Agree
Nice
" 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
World
Change
Great
" To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it. "
Howard Jacobson
Philosopher
Jew
Like
" Think of the aged and bed-ridden Matisse cutting out strips of coloured paper, much as a child might, and investing them with a more than mortal vitality... Those strips of paper resonate because they prove that our materials don't determine in advance the worth of what we make. "
Howard Jacobson
Think
Prove
Child
" 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
Country
Enjoy
Living
" One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow. "
Howard Jacobson
Own
Work
Tomorrow
" 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
Violence
Creative
Culture
" Literature is a house with many mansions. "
Howard Jacobson
Many
House
Literature
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Problem
Money
Homeless
" If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly. "
Howard Jacobson
Yourself
You
Say
" 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
Lawyers
Us
Question
" In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax. "
Howard Jacobson
Perfect
Restaurant
End
" Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. "
Howard Jacobson
Most
Been
Whom
" It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author's job to point it out. "
Howard Jacobson
People
Bad
Always
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Him
Literature
Story
" 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
Reflect
Will
Arguing
" 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
World
Thought
Free
" Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair. "
Howard Jacobson
Interesting
Affair
Play
" Failing to see the point is not a virtue. "
Howard Jacobson
Failing
Virtue
Point
" Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one. "
Howard Jacobson
Yourself
You
Way
" There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional. "
Howard Jacobson
Most
Fictional
Mind
" I've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing. "
Howard Jacobson
Woman
Back
Desire
" When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy. "
Howard Jacobson
Emotion
Fool
Thinks
" Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary. "
Howard Jacobson
Listening
Child
Speak