255 Quotes by Howard Jacobson

What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one’s subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one’s subject – these are important questions.

At any age there is future one doesn’t have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can’t take a little more.

It’s never over till it’s over with a friend.

A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don’t believe anything with robustness, you’re doing something more radical than anything else.

Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else.

I’m a Jewish Jane Austen.

But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off.

That’s how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor. If that’s how I look, that’s what I must be.

He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking.