Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Howard Jacobson

Related Quotes:

" Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.' "

Howard Jacobson

" Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. "

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

" 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

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

Howard Jacobson

" Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I'd vandalised and now limit myself to 'Good wishes.' "

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

" 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

" 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

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month - I've no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when - fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order - well in order, I presume - to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning. "

Howard Jacobson

" We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe. "

Howard Jacobson

" The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism. "

Howard Jacobson

" Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic. "

Howard Jacobson

" You don't have to believe the electorate secretly hankers for a dose of Marxist-Leninism to accept that there are deep levels of justified bitterness out there waiting to be tapped. "

Howard Jacobson

" Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift. "

Howard Jacobson

" Rejection is the one constant of human experience. "

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

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference. "

Howard Jacobson