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Howard Jacobson Quotes


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Quotes by Howard Jacobson

Showing 181-190 of 200 Quotes by Howard Jacobson

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

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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

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Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'.

~Howard Jacobson

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Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job.

~Howard Jacobson

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To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

~Howard Jacobson

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The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.

~Howard Jacobson

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Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.

~Howard Jacobson

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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

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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

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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

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Biography

Nationality: British

Type: Novelist

Born: August 25th, 1942

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