Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?

Howard Jacobson

Imagination Freedom Art

Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.

Thing Thin Term

I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you.

Howard Jacobson

Time You Without

Rejection is the one constant of human experience.

Howard Jacobson

Experience Tan T

You won't get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won't get a reasoned account of the joys of being 'linked' from somebody who's already 'in.'

Howard Jacobson

Men Art You

Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?

Howard Jacobson

Imagination Freedom Art

I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.

Howard Jacobson

War Men You

My mother's side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people's excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me.

Howard Jacobson

Time You Writer

As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.

Howard Jacobson

War Money Change

One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.

Howard Jacobson

Work Writers Writer

The young come in many guises: vigorous and passionate, vindictive and mean-spirited. And not every person over 65 is dozing in a retirement home.

Howard Jacobson

Men Home Young

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

Howard Jacobson

Men Great Art

Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

Howard Jacobson

You Will Who

In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax.

Howard Jacobson

Sad Wit Wing

To any young person starting out on life and looking to make a quick fortune, I have this advice: forget banking, but go instead into security, scaffolding, or urban trench digging. Not in a hands-on way. I mean start a company.

Howard Jacobson

Life Art Young

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.

Howard Jacobson

Truth Great World

With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it.

Howard Jacobson

Wit Want Voice

Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.

Howard Jacobson

Men T Sucker

Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving.

Howard Jacobson

Whom Who UN

The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.

Howard Jacobson

Yin Vice Trying

You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere.

Howard Jacobson

Your You Where

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.

Howard Jacobson

I've been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn't a good husband, but I wasn't a good anything then. Nowadays, I'm much kinder.

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

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.

Howard Jacobson

Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided.

Howard Jacobson

Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe.

Howard Jacobson

I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn't move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days.

Howard Jacobson

Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of 'American Pastoral' - to imagine the impact on a good man of America's fall from the family decencies of the '30s and '40s to the self-centred violence of the '60s - outstrips anything Sabbath's Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer's mind.

Howard Jacobson

Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right.

Howard Jacobson

Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'.

Howard Jacobson

I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.

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.

Howard Jacobson

It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary.

Howard Jacobson

Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.'

Howard Jacobson

Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.

Howard Jacobson

It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius.

Howard Jacobson

I've never owned a T-shirt. I don't like vests or sweaters or cardies with zips. I like a proper shirt with a collar. There's nothing else that I think I look nice in. I don't think there's anything else that other men look nice in, to be honest. Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling.

Howard Jacobson

Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.

Howard Jacobson

How Donald Trump has come so far with so few words - how he even managed to keep up conversationally with all those beauty queens - is a question I don't expect ever to be solved.

Howard Jacobson

People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words.

Howard Jacobson

Think of the aged and bed-ridden Matisse cutting out strips of coloured paper, much as a child might, and investing them with a more than mortal vitality... Those strips of paper resonate because they prove that our materials don't determine in advance the worth of what we make.

Howard Jacobson