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

Howard Jacobson

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" Many a trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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 are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were. "

Howard Jacobson

" 'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate. "

Howard Jacobson

" Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised. "

Howard Jacobson

" For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think. "

Howard Jacobson

" I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" 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

" Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with. "

Howard Jacobson

" I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket - a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney - the world was all before me. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children. "

Howard Jacobson

" Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal. "

Howard Jacobson

" Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is. "

Howard Jacobson

" Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see. "

Howard Jacobson

" I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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

" Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it. "

Howard Jacobson

" I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower. "

Howard Jacobson

" The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect. "

Howard Jacobson