Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Howard Jacobson

Related Quotes:

" To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else. "

Howard Jacobson

" To be clear, I abhor the separation wall. It is an eyesore in itself and makes tangible the failed diplomacy and cruel short-sightedness that causes such misery in the region. No Palestinian can see that wall and not wonder if the Israelis mean it to stay there forever, a constant reminder of what they never intend to change. "

Howard Jacobson

" Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic. "

Howard Jacobson

" If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice. "

Howard Jacobson

" The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy. "

Howard Jacobson

" Rejection is the one constant of human experience. "

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

" I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen. "

Howard Jacobson

" When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market. "

Howard Jacobson

" There's no law that says you have to be consistent in your preferences. "

Howard Jacobson

" One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves - before anyone else gets to do it. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down. "

Howard Jacobson

" My mother's side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people's excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me. "

Howard Jacobson

" Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you. "

Howard Jacobson

" The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson