Howard Jacobson Quotes

My literary success meant nothing to me.

I don't sort of sit in a chair and pompously feel proud of myself about all the things we might have accomplished.

My performances have finally caught up with my ego.

You know, you want to win and you want a ring. But when you win and you get the ring, you never really wear it.

My body of work means nothing to me.

The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.

It really means a lot that I won the gold medal - but I woke up the next morning expecting to feel different. I felt the same.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

I think that everything starts to go to hell when you start smelling your own farts and complimenting yourself on how great they smell. We're not going to turn into fart-smellers.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

I am not often proud.

I had the one goal to become world champion for so long and now that I've achieved it, I thought that it was the top of the mountain. But now that I'm up there, it's not.

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

Death is the room that is always empty.

It's not terrible, people telling you you're great; what's terrible is when you start believing it.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.

It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else.

Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts, unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.

It is a high for me. It is my biggest and most satisfying deal.

Fame is nothing but an empty name.

I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

No one ever stopped when they were winning.

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.