Top 115 Howard Jacobson Quotes

It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.

Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.

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.

Things happen in ‘If This is a Man’ that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in ‘King Lear’, or Conrad in ‘The Heart of Darkness’.

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.

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.

I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion, and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people’s opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity.

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.

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.

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.

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

A book isn’t noise to drown out other noise.

For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly.

Nobody who’s thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn’t come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can’t just say, ‘Well, it’s the will of the people.’

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.

I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them.

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

Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.

You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere.

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

‘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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Don’t imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference.

A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even.

I am happiest now. There’s nothing like running out of time to make you realise you’re in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you.

I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport.

A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.

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.

Literature is a house with many mansions.

Show me a novel that’s not comic, and I’ll show you a novel that’s not doing its job.

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.

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.

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.

To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it.

Rejection is the one constant of human experience.

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.

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.

Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided.

I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.

Sometimes, a writer’s life alone can tell a story.

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?

Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised.

For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.

I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he’s so different from that.

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.

The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words ‘Never Forget’ become irksome eventually.

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.

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.

Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.

People keep saying you can’t satirize Trump because he’s beyond satire, but it’s not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words.

Love is a brainworm.

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.

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.

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

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.’

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