Author

The day I don't attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn't care less what anyone thinks of his appearance - someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal.

From Howard Jacobson

Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

From Howard Jacobson

You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last.

From Howard Jacobson

Politically it's easy to salve one's conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again.

From Howard Jacobson

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

From Howard Jacobson

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

From Howard Jacobson

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.

From Howard Jacobson

As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right.

From Howard Jacobson

Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial.

From Howard Jacobson

The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don't have Italian tailors we can spare here.

From Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Notable Quotes

Authors with Similar Views

Michael Leunig

Nicole Krauss

Salman Rushdie

Daniel Barenboim

Kate Forsyth

Authors with Opposing Views

Rabindranath Tagore

Aesop

Alex Berenson

Alex North

Alistair Petrie