Quotes by Howard Jacobson

About Howard Jacobson:

Howard Jacobson is a Man Booker Prize-winning British author and journalist. He is best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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...

Howard Jacobson

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...' ...

Howard Jacobson

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?

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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, o...

Howard Jacobson

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 obligation to drown.

Howard Jacobson

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

Howard Jacobson

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. - well, I was not alone in feeling that. We were all who we were because we were not them. So why ...

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

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.

Howard Jacobson

You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.

Howard Jacobson

Author Bio

  • NameHoward Jacobson
  • DescriptionBritish author and journalist
  • BornAugust 25, 1942
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionTelevision Presenter; Novelist; Writer
  • AwardsMan Booker Prize; Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize