Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world. "

Howard Jacobson

Related Quotes:

" 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

" 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

" 'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story. "

Howard Jacobson

" I've always felt as much outside the Jewish experience as in it. It astonished my family that I wrote about things Jewish. "

Howard Jacobson

" This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up 'Steppenwolf,' and you'll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ, and you'll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you'll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network. "

Howard Jacobson

" When I see ultra-Orthodox Jews stamping all over Jaffa, or when I see them deciding who is a Jew, I think: 'What's happened to the grand dream of Zionism?' I don't like to see ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel. What's wrong with Manchester? "

Howard Jacobson

" Certainly a curtain has never fallen too soon for me. Every play is too long, even the short ones. Every concert, every film, every television programme the same. "

Howard Jacobson

" The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" '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. "

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

" Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair. "

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

" I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day. "

Howard Jacobson

" If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly. "

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

" 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

" If the great thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone, the bad thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone. "

Howard Jacobson

" The young come in many guises: vigorous and passionate, vindictive and mean-spirited. And not every person over 65 is dozing in a retirement home. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession. "

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

" 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

" Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them. "

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

" 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

" When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism. "

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