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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 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Howard Jacobson

Philosopher

Jew

" 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. "

" Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't. "

" Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story. "

" Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job. "

" You don't have to be in pursuit of a body beautiful to wish yourself to be the flexuously willowy creature you once were or, failing that, just to be able to pick up something you have dropped. "

" 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. "

" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. "

" I wouldn't suppose for one moment that there's a single one of Trump's voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs. "

" In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next. "

" Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money. "

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

" Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one. "

" Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees. "

" People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic. "

" With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it. "

" 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. "

" Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up. "

Howard Jacobson

Hard

Left

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

" 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. "

" 'Great Expectations', in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives club could ever be. "

" I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert. "

" It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it. "

" I never believe any politician talking about popular culture. "

" You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do. "

" No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish. "