Howard Jacobson Quotes

Novelists are drawn to failure. Those who prosper in the world as it is have no need to re-imagine it.

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

There was no child. Children spoilt the story.

Novels began as a comic form and should remain as a comic form.

Art is the great thing that rescues us from mere opinion.

People who see what’s coming have faulty chronology, that is all. Treslove’s clocks were all wrong. 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 [...] his happiness, his future – to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past.

He was a man who saw things coming. Not shadowy premonitions before and after sleep, but real and present dangers in the daylit world.

His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one.

The chicken symbolises the pleasure that Jewish men take in having a team of women to cook it for them.

The politics of youth are, by definition, the politics of ignorance.