Top 214 Quotes & Sayings by Howard Jacobson

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

Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.

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.

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

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

'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.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

'Legality' is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.

I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy.

The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.

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

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.

I've always felt that desire. To get a woman to throw back her head in laughter is a hot thing.

As for 'Great Expectations', it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.

The novels I planned to write were never going to be funny books about Jews. They were going to be country house books. Only later on could I write what I knew I was best at writing about.

I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day.

Literature is a house with many mansions.

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.

Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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've been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn't a good husband, but I wasn't a good anything then. Nowadays, I'm much kinder.

The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair.

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.

What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.

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

There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.

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.

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.

When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market.

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.

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.

Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.

It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author's job to point it out.

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.

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

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.