Howard Jacobson Quotes
A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.
The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.
All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?
What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.
I have a son, but I've never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting.
You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.
The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't.
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.
Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.
I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway.
People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic.
So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.
A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility.
But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it?