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" Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job. "

Howard Jacobson

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" For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think. "

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" 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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" You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere. "

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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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" Love is a brainworm. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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" 'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate. "

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" You don't divorce simply because your spouse has a number of qualities you dislike and on occasions makes your life uncomfortable. If you are reasonable, you view divorce as a measure of last resort. There are many steps you can take in the meantime. You might even call in a trained mediator. "

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" I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport. "

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

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" Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. "

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" 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. "

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" Alone of prejudices, anti-Zionism is sacrosanct. How very dare we distinguish the motivation of one sort from another? Or question, in any instance, an anti-Zionist's good faith? In fact, what determines whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is the nature of it. "

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" Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one. "

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" I wouldn't suppose for one moment that there's a single one of Trump's voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs. "

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" The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy. "

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" I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion, and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people's opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity. "

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" You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books. "

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" Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose. "

Howard Jacobson

" The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect. "

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" I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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. "

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" 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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" 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. "

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

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