Quotes from 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.

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

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.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

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

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.

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

The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.

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.

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

Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair.

How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.

Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink wouldn't take would stay on the kitchen table. Treslove liked that about her. She didn't believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn't a price to pay for pleasure.

At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them.

But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think?

It's never over till it's over with a friend.

I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it.

How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read . A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.

T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.

Was he a bad man or just a foolish one? He didn't feel bad to himself. As a husband he believed himself to be essentially good and loyal. It just wasn't written in a man's nature to be monogamous, that was all. And he owed something to his nature even when his nature was at odds with his desire, which was to stay at home and cherish his wife. It was his nature – all nature, the rule of nature – that was the bastard, not him.

Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew — small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes.

If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?

I suspect you're thinking of Pascal,' Finkler said, finally.'Only he said the opposite. He said 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...' 'You're in the shit.