Quotes from 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.

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

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

Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.

I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport.

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.

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.

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?

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

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

Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job.

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.

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.

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

Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged.

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.

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

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.

I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day.

The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't.

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.

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.

For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly.

I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.