Howard Jacobson Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Howard Jacobson:

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

One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.

Howard Jacobson

Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children.

Howard Jacobson

You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere.

Howard Jacobson

I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.

Howard Jacobson

Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that's new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world - block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion, and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people's opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity.

Howard Jacobson

The presence of a Jew in any movement no more guarantees it to be innocent of antisemitism than guilty. And that applies to anti-Zionism, too. Anti-Zionist Jews exist, but that tells one nothing about anti-Zionism.

Howard Jacobson

Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

Howard Jacobson

Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it.

Howard Jacobson

How Donald Trump has come so far with so few words - how he even managed to keep up conversationally with all those beauty queens - is a question I don't expect ever to be solved.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson