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" Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see. "

Howard Jacobson

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" It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it. "

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" Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making. "

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" The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own. "

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" Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'. "

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" 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. "

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" Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely? "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

Howard Jacobson

" Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre. "

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" Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour. "

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

" I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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" 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

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

Howard Jacobson

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

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" Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love? "

Howard Jacobson

" The young come in many guises: vigorous and passionate, vindictive and mean-spirited. And not every person over 65 is dozing in a retirement home. "

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

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. "

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" The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't. "

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. "

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

Howard Jacobson

" When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market. "

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

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" 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. "

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" A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with. "

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" 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