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" 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

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" A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even. "

Howard Jacobson

" I am enthralled until the last ball Djokovic hits, and the moment it is over and he is on his knees eating grass, I sink into my chair, cannot believe I have spent another fleeting fortnight of the few summers I have left caring about the outcome of contests I will have forgotten in the blink of an eye, and begin to question my sanity. "

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

" A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" You fall in love differently when you are young and far from home in a seductive place. You fall in love with the very air you breathe, and the vivid colours and the unbearably sweet sensation of distance and unaccustomedness. "

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

" 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

" One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling. "

Howard Jacobson

" Certainly a curtain has never fallen too soon for me. Every play is too long, even the short ones. Every concert, every film, every television programme the same. "

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

" I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn't move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days. "

Howard Jacobson

" A book isn't noise to drown out other noise. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" You don't have to be in pursuit of a body beautiful to wish yourself to be the flexuously willowy creature you once were or, failing that, just to be able to pick up something you have dropped. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" Love is a brainworm. "

Howard Jacobson

" I have a son, but I've never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words. "

Howard Jacobson

" What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities. "

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. "

Howard Jacobson

" Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair. "

Howard Jacobson

" Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually. "

Howard Jacobson