Howard Jacobson Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by 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
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Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan.
~Howard Jacobson
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If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?
~Howard Jacobson
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Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story.
~Howard Jacobson
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Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised.
~Howard Jacobson
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If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.
~Howard Jacobson
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Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.
~Howard Jacobson
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Alone of prejudices, anti-Zionism is sacrosanct. How very dare we distinguish the motivation of one sort from another? Or question, in any instance, an anti-Zionist's good faith? In fact, what determines whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is the nature of it.
~Howard Jacobson
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It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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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.
~Howard Jacobson
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Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I'd vandalised and now limit myself to 'Good wishes.'
~Howard Jacobson
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You won't get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won't get a reasoned account of the joys of being 'linked' from somebody who's already 'in.'
~Howard Jacobson
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The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.
~Howard Jacobson
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Maybe we'd forgotten what socialists are meant to look and sound like. Well, now we've been reminded. They're meant to look and sound like Jeremy Corbyn.
~Howard Jacobson
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Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.
~Howard Jacobson
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Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged.
~Howard Jacobson
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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.
~Howard Jacobson
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A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.
~Howard Jacobson
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That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.
~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.
~Howard Jacobson
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Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up.
~Howard Jacobson
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Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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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.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.
~Howard Jacobson
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There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month - I've no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when - fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order - well in order, I presume - to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning.
~Howard Jacobson
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To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company.
~Howard Jacobson
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Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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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.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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Poets are not meant to be in competition.
~Howard Jacobson
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There's a lot to be said for misanthropy.
~Howard Jacobson
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Failing to see the point is not a virtue.
~Howard Jacobson
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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.
~Howard Jacobson
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It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't.
~Howard Jacobson
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It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.
~Howard Jacobson
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Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with.
~Howard Jacobson
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What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.
~Howard Jacobson
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I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.
~Howard Jacobson
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You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last.
~Howard Jacobson
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For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly.
~Howard Jacobson
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The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.
~Howard Jacobson
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Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
~Howard Jacobson
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It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius.
~Howard Jacobson
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Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.
~Howard Jacobson
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As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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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.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.
~Howard Jacobson
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It's not only teenagers who think they look good in pre-holed jeans, and I doubt it's only the superannuated who are amused by Ant and Dec.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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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
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When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.
~Howard Jacobson
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I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself.
~Howard Jacobson
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I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me £2,000 a year to amble on a treadmill for half an hour a week and sit and read Grazia in the cooling-off area.
~Howard Jacobson
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Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it.
~Howard Jacobson
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Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.
~Howard Jacobson
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It's a weakness of mine to forget what it is I've just been talking about so that when people make witty allusions to it, I stare at them open-mouthed, not knowing what they're talking about.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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A book isn't noise to drown out other noise.
~Howard Jacobson
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Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'
~Howard Jacobson
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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.
~Howard Jacobson
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I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway.
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.
~Howard Jacobson
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Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one.
~Howard Jacobson
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Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.
~Howard Jacobson
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The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion.
~Howard Jacobson
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There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
~Howard Jacobson
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Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic.
~Howard Jacobson
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I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport.
~Howard Jacobson
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Love is a brainworm.
~Howard Jacobson
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Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them.
~Howard Jacobson
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It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.
~Howard Jacobson
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Looking back, I realise it wasn't only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn't knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn't they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them?
~Howard Jacobson
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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
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Politically it's easy to salve one's conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again.
~Howard Jacobson
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There's no law that says you have to be consistent in your preferences.
~Howard Jacobson
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When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.
~Howard Jacobson
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Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal.
~Howard Jacobson
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I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things.
~Howard Jacobson
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The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.
~Howard Jacobson
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Rejection is the one constant of human experience.
~Howard Jacobson
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We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world.
~Howard Jacobson
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A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with.
~Howard Jacobson
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I am enthralled until the last ball Djokovic hits, and the moment it is over and he is on his knees eating grass, I sink into my chair, cannot believe I have spent another fleeting fortnight of the few summers I have left caring about the outcome of contests I will have forgotten in the blink of an eye, and begin to question my sanity.
~Howard Jacobson
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If you want a good life, don't succeed at anything too early or too well. And don't choose a profession that attracts money or attention. The minute people want to see you doing what you do, you're finished.
~Howard Jacobson
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Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference.
~Howard Jacobson
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A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.
~Howard Jacobson
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If it's bathos you want - and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end - nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it's playing sport.
~Howard Jacobson
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