Howard Jacobson Quotes

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

When I write fiction, I never try to deliver a message; I just want to tell a story. But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart.

I'm looking forward to writing more novels for young adults.

I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.

My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.

I often say flippantly that the short story is... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.

I don't have a clear biography of my own that I could recount in an interesting way. I'm made up of the characters that I pulled out of my head, that I invented.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough - it's a journalistic enterprise, ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.