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" There mustn't be a moment when we turn on the TV and think, 'There's Trump in the White House' - that must never feel normal. "

Howard Jacobson

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" There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" Rejection is the one constant of human experience. "

Howard Jacobson

" People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words. "

Howard Jacobson

" A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair. "

Howard Jacobson

" I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me £2,000 a year to amble on a treadmill for half an hour a week and sit and read Grazia in the cooling-off area. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even. "

Howard Jacobson

" Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British. "

Howard Jacobson

" Failing to see the point is not a virtue. "

Howard Jacobson

" Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love? "

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

" When people speak to me of the torment of writing, I can think only of what it was like before I wrote: once writing meant writing and not thinking about writing, I knew nothing of any torment. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" You cannot exercise and be amused about it. You cannot integrate the dying bug into your core workout and hold to the position that you are a spiritual being. In this way, the body and the mind are each other's opposite unto death, which is why you have to choose which of them you are going to follow. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability. "

Howard Jacobson

" I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself. "

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

" 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

" 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

" The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually. "

Howard Jacobson