- Most
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- Nov 07, 2020
Howard Jacobson Quotes
Most Famous Howard Jacobson Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- First
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- Nov 07, 2020
Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.
- British
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- Nov 07, 2020
Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
- Dangerous
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Money
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Opera
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- Nov 07, 2020
What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story.
- Armenians
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Man
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right.
- Death
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Here
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Rest
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Men
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- Nov 07, 2020
Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.
- Exhilarating
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Looking
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Concur
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Political
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Person
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Entertainment
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- Nov 07, 2020
Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised.
- Harm
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- Nov 07, 2020
Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them.
- Faith
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Home
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.
- Die
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- Nov 07, 2020
The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.
- Heart
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Get
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- Nov 07, 2020
Sensitivity doesn't necessarily make you easy to get on with.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I'd vandalised and now limit myself to 'Good wishes.'
- Keep Smiling
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- Nov 07, 2020
Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'
- Not Knowing
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.
- Eating
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- Nov 07, 2020
In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax.
- Caring
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020
If it's bathos you want - and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end - nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it's playing sport.
- Beautiful
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- Nov 07, 2020
You don't have to be in pursuit of a body beautiful to wish yourself to be the flexuously willowy creature you once were or, failing that, just to be able to pick up something you have dropped.
- Health
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- Nov 07, 2020
I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me £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.
- Knowledge
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- Nov 07, 2020
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?
- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Left
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- Nov 07, 2020
Once in a while, we need the hard Left to pipe up.
- Bitterness
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- Nov 07, 2020
You don't have to believe the electorate secretly hankers for a dose of Marxist-Leninism to accept that there are deep levels of justified bitterness out there waiting to be tapped.
- Look
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- See
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
There's a lot to be said for misanthropy.
- Experience
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- Nov 07, 2020
Rejection is the one constant of human experience.
- Look
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Ignorance
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- Nov 07, 2020
Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.
- Political
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.'
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it.
- Past
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- Nov 07, 2020
I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.
- Change
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fool
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- Nov 07, 2020
When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.
- Drown
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- Nov 07, 2020
A book isn't noise to drown out other noise.
- Nov 07, 2020
Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic.
- Love Is
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- Nov 07, 2020
Love is a brainworm.
- Agree
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- Nov 07, 2020
It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.
- Like
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- Nov 07, 2020