Howard Jacobson Quotes

A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility.

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)?

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

All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?

Don't I look after you when you're ill?' 'You do. You're marvellous to me when I'm ill. It's when I'm well that you're no use.

The perfect bacon sandwich is on white bread, very soft and very thick. Sourdough with a good crust. The bacon is half way to being crispy - and there's lots of it - and enough brown sauce to trickle down your arm. You've not really enjoyed a bacon sandwich unless 10 minutes later you're still licking your wrists.

To bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.

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 ...

A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.

I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.

That was what living a serious life meant, wasn't it, honoring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light?

Do not hope for too much. But do not settle for too little.

At any age there is future one doesn't have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can't take a little more.

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.

Was it better then - measuring the loss - not to know happiness at all? Better to go through life waiting for what never came, because that way you had less to mourn?

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

But the shouts and smell of smoke had a powerful effect on me. I don't say they excited me, but they gave a sort of universality to what I was feeling. I am who I am because I am not them - well, I was not alone in feeling that. We were all who we were because we were not them. So why did that translate into hate? I don't know, but when everyone's feeling the same thing it can appear to be reasonableness.

He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.

Whoever spoke of a wise lover? The wiser the lover, the longer ago he stopped loving.

There is no word for the sound a life makes.

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.

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

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

Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else.

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

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.

Aren't all dreads half desires?

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.'..

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?

A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed.

But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off.

He no sooner saw the woman than he saw the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light, the bed sheets billowing like clouds, the wisp of aromatic smoke winding from the chimney - only for every wrack of it - its lattice of crimson roof tiles, its gables and dormer windows, his happiness, his future - to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past.

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

A phrase such as 'the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis' for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It was like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic.

Art is made by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn't art. And of course it is loved as consolation, or a call to arms, by those who feel the same. One of the reasons there seem to be fewer readers for literature today than there were yesterday is that the concept of failure has been outlawed. If we are all beautiful, all clever, all happy, all successes in our way, what do we want with the language of the dispossessed? But the nature of failure ensures that writers will go on writing no matter how many readers they have. You have to master the embarrassments and ignominies of life.