Quotes from Howard Jacobson

you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist . . .

Come over,' he said. 'I'll order in Chinese.' 'You speak Chinese now?' 'Funny guy, Libor. Be here at eight.' 'You sure you're up for it?' 'I'm a philosopher, I'm not sure about anything.'..

But you don't always have to ask to know.

you can't have belief without intolerance.

Just when you've overcome the grief, you realise you are left with the loneliness.

Henry believes he knows exactly when the ninety-four-year-old woman in the neighbouring apartment dies. He hears her turn off. Until now he has not been able to distinguish her from her appliances – her washing machine, her vacuum cleaner, her radiators, her television. But the moment she gives up the ghost he detects the cessation of a noise of which he was not previously aware. A hum, was it? A whirr? Impossible to say. There is no word for the sound a life makes.

Is that what lives on longest, the sadness? The proof of our being weak, not the proof of our being strong?

On account of their innate aggressiveness, songs of that sort were no longer played on the console. Not banned – nothing was banned exactly – simply not played. Encouraged to fall into desuetude, like the word desuetude.

I exaggerate but only to revive the dying art of hyperbole.

Could that be why Treslove so often found himself alone? Was he protecting himself against the companioned happiness he longed for because he dreaded how he would feel when it was taken from him?

Ludzkie istoty rzadko s? tak niebezpieczne jak wtedy, kiedy rozp?ywaj? si? nad dobroci? w?asnych intencji.

The way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction.

The boastful are thin-skinned and the intolerant are forever looking over their shoulders

But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it?

For himself, he wanted to impose his values on no one. He wasn't even sure he knew what his values were.

But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn't instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.

People who see what's coming have faulty chronology, that is all.

So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.

In my experience people who can't stop making jokes about their identity aren't easy with it. The man of the world accepts who he is and the influences which have made him, and then gets on with living in the world.

It is from his grandmother that Henry learns that punctuation can be a weapon. With a comma you can hurt someone.

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.

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.

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.

A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.