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Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet
Of Mice and Men
Frankenstein

Howard Jacobson Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Howard Jacobson

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

– Howard Jacobson

I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me ô?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

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

– Howard Jacobson

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

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

There’s a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

– Howard Jacobson

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

– Howard Jacobson

Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you’d just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding ‘Keep smiling – Fyodor.’

– Howard Jacobson

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

The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.

– Howard Jacobson

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

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

As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It’s important to get your operas right.

– Howard Jacobson

Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There’s more than one way of being brutal.

– Howard Jacobson

Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.

– Howard Jacobson

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

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

Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men’s nostalgia.

– Howard Jacobson

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.

– Howard Jacobson

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

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

– Howard Jacobson

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

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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