Top 214 Quotes & Sayings by Howard Jacobson - Page 4

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 painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.

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

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

The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That's at the heart of 'J', a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in 'J,' there's a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief.

You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was.

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

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.

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

I always, always wanted to be a writer.

There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools... They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding.

That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?

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

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'.

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish.

With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it.

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.

'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.

Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.

I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it.

Although I was too young to understand the theory of universal (that's to say male) guilt, I was old enough to know which sex suffered migraine and which sex caused it.

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.

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.

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

It's never over till it's over with a friend.

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

Marriage is like a barbecue. When you light a barbecue, it's very exciting to see the flames. That's lovely, but you have to wait until the flames have died down. Everything that you want from a barbecue happens on the hot embers. You can't cook on those flames.

I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.

How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.

The perfect bacon sandwich is on white bread, very soft and very thick. Sourdough with a good crust. The bacon is half way to being crispy - and there's lots of it - and enough brown sauce to trickle down your arm. You've not really enjoyed a bacon sandwich unless 10 minutes later you're still licking your wrists.

How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.

All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?