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" One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic. "

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

" 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

" There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" To be clear, I abhor the separation wall. It is an eyesore in itself and makes tangible the failed diplomacy and cruel short-sightedness that causes such misery in the region. No Palestinian can see that wall and not wonder if the Israelis mean it to stay there forever, a constant reminder of what they never intend to change. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

" You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic. "

Howard Jacobson

" Love is a brainworm. "

Howard Jacobson

" The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don't have Italian tailors we can spare here. "

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

" Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided. "

Howard Jacobson

" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession. "

Howard Jacobson

" It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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