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" When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy. "

Howard Jacobson

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" Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial. "

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" 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. "

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" Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. "

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" I've always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother's friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny. "

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" Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined. "

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" Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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" I've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing. "

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" Where there are no spectators, there is no sponsorship. Where there is no sponsorship, there is no money. Where there is no money, there are no officials with fingers in the pot. The lesson to be learnt from this is simple. If we want honest sport, we have to stop watching it. "

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" I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn't move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don't have Italian tailors we can spare here. "

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

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" I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite. "

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" '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. "

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" 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. "

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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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

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