Quotes by Howard Jacobson

“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.”

“I have a son, but I've never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting.”

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

“Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of t...”

“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 nig...”

“People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic.”

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

“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.”

“An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obliga...”

“Although I was too young to understand the theory of universal (that's to say male) guilt, I was old enough to know which sex suffered migraine and which sex caused it.”

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

“I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.”

“But here's something that puzzles me: is not victim-blaming counted among the worst of crimes wherever courses on faith and diversity, race and ethnicity, feminist philosophy and so on are taught. ...”

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

“In the highly improbable event of his being asked to nominate the one most un-Jewish thing he could think of, Sefton Goldberg would have been hard pressed to decide between Nature – that's to say b...”

“He was as sentimental as Hitler about applause and crowds.”