255 Quotes by Howard Jacobson

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.

I had worked on the markets with my father before going to university, so I possessed an apparent street-smartness, had access to a colourful costermonger vocabulary, and tried passing myself off as a bit of spiv. But my contemporaries saw through me. At heart, they knew I was as bookish and oversensitive as they were.

Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.

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.

The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.

Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

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.

The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.