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
If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice. – Howard Jacobson
Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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