HOWARD JACOBSON

I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn't move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days.

There's a lot to be said for misanthropy.

The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.

Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.'

When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.

In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax.

Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.

Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.

'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.

Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.

Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged.

I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert.

Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing.

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

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.

Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.

Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift.

Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'

That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence.

The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.

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?

Things happen in 'If This is a Man' that are beyond ordinary daily experience, but it is still us to whom they are happening, and the understanding Levi seeks is no different in kind from that sought by Shakespeare in 'King Lear', or Conrad in 'The Heart of Darkness'.

If it's bathos you want - and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end - nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it's playing sport.