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" 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
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" I've been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn't a good husband, but I wasn't a good anything then. Nowadays, I'm much kinder. "
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Next
" 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
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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? "
Howard Jacobson
Freedom
People
Imagination
" 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
" If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of. "
Howard Jacobson
Life
Question
Side
" 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
" Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. "
Howard Jacobson
Against
Many
Spirit
" When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism. "
Howard Jacobson
Reason
Art
Dictators
" Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference. "
Howard Jacobson
Difference
You
Blind
" Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving. "
Howard Jacobson
Back
Leaving
Loss
" A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession. "
Howard Jacobson
Vigilance
Never
Out
" It's not only teenagers who think they look good in pre-holed jeans, and I doubt it's only the superannuated who are amused by Ant and Dec. "
Howard Jacobson
Only
Good
Jeans
" Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous. "
Howard Jacobson
Only
Man
Always
" If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly. "
Howard Jacobson
Yourself
You
Say
" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. "
Howard Jacobson
Believe
Argument
Jew
" The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own. "
Howard Jacobson
Prepared
Educated
More
" The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it. "
Howard Jacobson
Boredom
Thought
Environment
" Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British. "
Howard Jacobson
Virtues
Always
Great
" A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with. "
Howard Jacobson
Only
Healthy
Culture
" 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
" Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see. "
Howard Jacobson
Our
Only
Works
" If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice. "
Howard Jacobson
Will
Voice
Single
" 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
" 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
" That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence. "
Howard Jacobson
Reflect
Will
Arguing
" 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
" Let's be honest with one another: almost everything is too long except life, and I know people who wouldn't even concur with that exception. "
Howard Jacobson
Life
Almost
Honest
" There's a lot to be said for misanthropy. "
Howard Jacobson
Lot
Said
" 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
" 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