255 Quotes by Howard Jacobson

'Legality' is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.

When I was teaching at Cambridge, I sold handbags on the market.

I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things.

People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic.

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

I've always felt as much outside the Jewish experience as in it. It astonished my family that I wrote about things Jewish.

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

You don't have to be in pursuit of a body beautiful to wish yourself to be the flexuously willowy creature you once were or, failing that, just to be able to pick up something you have dropped.

One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves - before anyone else gets to do it.