I was a ‘reverence for life’ man – ‘see life steadily and see it whole’ – in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly ‘saved’ by reading, at least partially ‘repaired’ by it: made the better morally and existentially. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there’s an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence’s taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis’s, but you would still not call her hellish. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
Again and again, Primo Levi’s work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn’t. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
Show me a novel that’s not comic, and I’ll show you a novel that’s not doing its job. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can’t agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That’s at the heart of ‘J’, a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in ‘J,’ there’s a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
Family Guy’. It’s not only the funniest programme on television, it’s the most wonderfully, indecorously literate. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
