Howard Jacobson Quotes

I don't think if you're serious about literature your library is filled with award-winning books.

Great books are rare.

Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

Very wonderful books might be published, and very terrible books might be published.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.

When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad.

It's hard to judge literary merit.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

I think so much of young adult literature sort of gets ghettoized - the title 'young adult' makes people immediately discount it. And just like with books that get written for adults, there is plenty of young adult literature that is bad. But there is also plenty of young adult literature that is brilliant.