255 Quotes by Howard Jacobson

Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.

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.

Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.

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.

Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.

If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.

The terrorist isn't a problem because he doesn't conform; he's a problem because he does. It's what he conforms to that makes him dangerous.

It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.

One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.