Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Howard Jacobson

Related Quotes:

" Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of 'American Pastoral' - to imagine the impact on a good man of America's fall from the family decencies of the '30s and '40s to the self-centred violence of the '60s - outstrips anything Sabbath's Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer's mind. "

Howard Jacobson

" The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" Rejection is the one constant of human experience. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely? "

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

" You don't have to believe the electorate secretly hankers for a dose of Marxist-Leninism to accept that there are deep levels of justified bitterness out there waiting to be tapped. "

Howard Jacobson

" Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don't act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it's always possible he was more anxious than he let on. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson

" The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about. "

Howard Jacobson

" That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing? "

Howard Jacobson

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

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

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

Howard Jacobson

" Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making. "

Howard Jacobson

" When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, 'I can't stand this'. Then I'd meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I'd think, 'Hang on'. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject. "

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

" If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them. "

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 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 Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto. "

Howard Jacobson

" Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift. "

Howard Jacobson

" 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. "

Howard Jacobson