There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools… They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
I have a son, but I’ve never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
Trump’s hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift. Howard Jacobson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
