Howard Jacobson Zitate auf Englisch

Seite 2

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

Howard Jacobson

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.

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

A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.

Howard Jacobson

Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.

Howard Jacobson

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

Howard Jacobson

When I first went to Israel, I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, 'I can't stand this'. Then I'd meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are and what mamzers the Jews are, and I'd think, 'Hang on'. It should be hard to make up your mind on any serious subject.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things.

Howard Jacobson

It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

Failing to see the point is not a virtue.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional.

Howard Jacobson

Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.'

Howard Jacobson

That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence.

Howard Jacobson

You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.

Howard Jacobson

Love is a brainworm.

Howard Jacobson

Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one.

Howard Jacobson

I always, always wanted to be a writer.

Howard Jacobson

There's a lot to be said for misanthropy.

Howard Jacobson

If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of.

Howard Jacobson

For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller ever gets to a more wonderful place.

Howard Jacobson

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.'

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

Literature more often tells the story of impulses we don't act on than of ones we do. I could joke about the Cain and Abel story with my brother without expecting him to be worried, though it's always possible he was more anxious than he let on.

Howard Jacobson

If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.

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