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" Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. "
Howard Jacobson
Will
Higher
Fall
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" Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't. "
Howard Jacobson
Reading
New
Experience
" 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
People
Mother
Me
" Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing. "
Howard Jacobson
Time
Silence
People
" The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about. "
Howard Jacobson
Writing
Country
Best
" Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it. "
Howard Jacobson
Know
Time
Men
" It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower. "
Howard Jacobson
Find
Better
Thought
" Failing to see the point is not a virtue. "
Howard Jacobson
Failing
Virtue
Point
" With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it. "
Howard Jacobson
Want
Comedy
Deep
" The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion. "
Howard Jacobson
See
Enjoy
Time
" 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
Him
Problem
He
" 'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate. "
Howard Jacobson
Only
Guy
Family
" Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works. "
Howard Jacobson
Reading
Say
Literature
" The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since. "
Howard Jacobson
Advice
Me
Tried
" 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
Place
Home
You
" I was a 'reverence for life' man - 'see life steadily and see it whole' - in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly 'saved' by reading, at least partially 'repaired' by it: made the better morally and existentially. "
Howard Jacobson
Life
See
Reading
" Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money. "
Howard Jacobson
Men
Sleep
Science
" In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next. "
Howard Jacobson
Experience
Changes
Book
" If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice. "
Howard Jacobson
Will
Voice
Single
" 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
Spirit
Music
Way
" As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right. "
Howard Jacobson
Important
Man
Young Man
" 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
" Poets are not meant to be in competition. "
Howard Jacobson
Poets
Meant To Be
Meant
" 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
" 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
" That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing? "
Howard Jacobson
Same
Test
You
" 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
Outside
Family
Experience
" It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't. "
Howard Jacobson
Fit
Where
Us
" I should have conceived the idea for 'The Mighty Walzer' earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player - shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that. "
Howard Jacobson
Winning
Women
Beautiful
" Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged. "
Howard Jacobson
Humanity
Matters
Cheat
" Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair. "
Howard Jacobson
Interesting
Affair
Play