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" The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since. "

Howard Jacobson

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" 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. "

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" Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided. "

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" 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.' "

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" If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly. "

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" Looking back, I realise it wasn't only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn't knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn't they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them? "

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" You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last. "

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" Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it. "

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" To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it. "

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" 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. "

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" You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was. "

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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? "

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" I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I've never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again. "

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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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" To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company. "

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" 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. "

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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'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. "

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" Love is a brainworm. "

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

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" 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

" I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them. "

Howard Jacobson

" Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised. "

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" 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. "

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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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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax. "

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" I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway. "

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" 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. "

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" Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia. "

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