J Howard Jacobson Quotes & Sayings

Aren't all dreads half desires? — Howard Jacobson

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. — Howard Jacobson

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. — 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

Marriage is like a barbecue. When you light a barbecue, it's very exciting to see the flames. That's lovely, but you have to wait until the flames have died down. Everything that you want from a barbecue happens on the hot embers. You can't cook on those flames. — Howard Jacobson

Why is dissatisfaction taken to be a mark of failing powers and patience, when it might just as easily be understood as a proper judgment on a foolish world? — Howard Jacobson

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)? — Howard Jacobson

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. — Howard Jacobson

There is no word for the sound a life makes. — Howard Jacobson

And thinking of her waiting to be found, while he was waiting to find, gave a beautiful symmetry to the love he felt for her. — Howard Jacobson

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. — Howard Jacobson

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

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur. — 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 ... '
'You're in the shit. — Howard Jacobson

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

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

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. — 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

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. — Howard Jacobson

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. — Howard Jacobson

That was what was cruel about superficial change: it exposed what could never change. — Howard Jacobson

What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions. — Howard Jacobson

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. — Howard Jacobson

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. — 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

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

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

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. — 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. 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. — Howard Jacobson

But you don't always have to ask to know. — Howard Jacobson