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" The terrorist isn't a problem because he doesn't conform; he's a problem because he does. It's what he conforms to that makes him dangerous. "
Howard Jacobson
Him
Problem
He
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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
Power
Literature
Doubt
" There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air. "
Howard Jacobson
Man
Incarceration
Air
" 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
" That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing.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
" We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. "
Howard Jacobson
World
Vanity
Too
" The day I don't attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn't care less what anyone thinks of his appearance - someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal. "
Howard Jacobson
Lost
World
Life
" It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius. "
Howard Jacobson
Reading
True
Be True
" 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
" It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge. "
Howard Jacobson
Wise
Book
Challenge
" 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
" I never believe any politician talking about popular culture. "
Howard Jacobson
Culture
About
Talking
" I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people. "
Howard Jacobson
Run
You
Think
" A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession. "
Howard Jacobson
Vigilance
Never
Out
" 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
People
Bad
Always
" There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest. "
Howard Jacobson
Rise
Rest
Small
" Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing. "
Howard Jacobson
Time
Silence
People
" As for 'Great Expectations', it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth. "
Howard Jacobson
Truth
World
Think
" 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. "
Howard Jacobson
Perfect
Restaurant
End
" I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport. "
Howard Jacobson
Watch
Watches
Kind
" A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with. "
Howard Jacobson
Only
Healthy
Culture
" 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
" There's a lot to be said for misanthropy. "
Howard Jacobson
Lot
Said
" 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
Winning
Women
Beautiful
" The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don't have Italian tailors we can spare here. "
Howard Jacobson
Here
Might
Spare
" 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
" Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing. "
Howard Jacobson
Why
Everything
He
" It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement. "
Howard Jacobson
Achievement
Agree
Nice
" Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of 'American Pastoral' - to imagine the impact on a good man of America's fall from the family decencies of the '30s and '40s to the self-centred violence of the '60s - outstrips anything Sabbath's Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer's mind. "
Howard Jacobson
Fall
Family
Good
" No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller ever gets to a more wonderful place. "
Howard Jacobson
Going
Artist
Wonderful
" To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it. "
Howard Jacobson
Philosopher
Jew
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