Howard Jacobson Zitate auf Englisch

Seite 3

I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket - a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney - the world was all before me.

Howard Jacobson

One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling.

Howard Jacobson

I've never owned a T-shirt. I don't like vests or sweaters or cardies with zips. I like a proper shirt with a collar. There's nothing else that I think I look nice in. I don't think there's anything else that other men look nice in, to be honest. Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with.

Howard Jacobson

If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

If you want a good life, don't succeed at anything too early or too well. And don't choose a profession that attracts money or attention. The minute people want to see you doing what you do, you're finished.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making.

Howard Jacobson

If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly.

Howard Jacobson

I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I've never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again.

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

I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.

Howard Jacobson

A book isn't noise to drown out other noise.

Howard Jacobson

I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves - before anyone else gets to do it.

Howard Jacobson

Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'

Howard Jacobson

I wouldn't suppose for one moment that there's a single one of Trump's voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs.

Howard Jacobson

Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic.

Howard Jacobson

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

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

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.

Howard Jacobson

I should have conceived the idea for 'The Mighty Walzer' earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player - shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson