Howard Jacobson Quotes

I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature. So I think that was probably my most valued characteristic as a teenager.

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

People who grew up on my books are now able to get the point across to others that they're worth reading.

Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.

For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.

My mother was a children's librarian, and I was raised on lots of English children's literature. It gave me this weird idea that I was English.

Literature is news that stays news.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.

The end of reading is not more books but more life.

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient.

Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.

I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.

In Iceland, book lives matter in every sense of that phrase: The shelf-life of the book, the lives in the book, the life of the writer, and the life of the reader.

When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.