255 Quotes by Howard Jacobson

Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention.

Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.

What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.

Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story.

Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving.

No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller ever gets to a more wonderful place.

The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?

A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with.