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" 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
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" Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability. "
Howard Jacobson
Everything
Literature
Criticism
" You won't get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won't get a reasoned account of the joys of being 'linked' from somebody who's already 'in.' "
Howard Jacobson
Political Party
You
Party
" If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket? "
Howard Jacobson
Power
Literature
Doubt
" Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up. "
Howard Jacobson
Up
Hard
Left
" Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary. "
Howard Jacobson
Listening
Child
Speak
" 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'. "
Howard Jacobson
Experience
Daily
Man
" Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.' "
Howard Jacobson
Finding
You
Smiling
" I've never owned a T-shirt. I don't like vests or sweaters or cardies with zips. I like a proper shirt with a collar. There's nothing else that I think I look nice in. I don't think there's anything else that other men look nice in, to be honest. Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with. "
Howard Jacobson
Nice
Words
Look
" 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
Tea
Wine
Writing
" 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
Wisdom
New
Power
" It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it. "
Howard Jacobson
Prize
Always
You
" Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal. "
Howard Jacobson
Being
More
Hands
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Me
Person
Prison
" There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional. "
Howard Jacobson
Most
Fictional
Mind
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
America
People
Words
" The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief. "
Howard Jacobson
Heart
Fear
Hate
" What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities. "
Howard Jacobson
Everybody
Houses
Anybody
" Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve. "
Howard Jacobson
World
Attitude
You
" 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
" Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with. "
Howard Jacobson
Sensitivity
Make
Get
" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. "
Howard Jacobson
Believe
Argument
Jew
" Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them. "
Howard Jacobson
You
Harm
Great
" 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
Nothing
Innocent
Jew
" I've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing. "
Howard Jacobson
Woman
Back
Desire
" The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto. "
Howard Jacobson
Christian
Survive
Story
" I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were. "
Howard Jacobson
Myself
University
Me
" When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, 'I can't stand this'. Then I'd meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I'd think, 'Hang on'. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject. "
Howard Jacobson
Mind
Thought
Think
" Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose. "
Howard Jacobson
Want
Leaves
Return
" To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else. "
Howard Jacobson
Other
Hating
Worse
" 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
Moment
Character
You