Howard Jacobson Quotes

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Pessimism is as American as apple pie - frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese.

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

Our degeneration, when it is traced back to its origin in our view of the world really consists in the fact that true optimism has vanished unperceived from our midst.

I'm a pessimist by nature. A pot head, but a pessimist.

It's kind of depressing, if you think about it. I mean, me being so young, and yet so cynical and suspicious.

Cynicism formulates issues clearly, but only to dismiss them.

Things are going downhill with you!' he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all.

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

“You don't have much faith in people, do you?” said David. “I don't have much faith in anything,” Roland replied. “Not even in myself.”

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.

I start out by believing the worst

There's too much of that where-every-prospect-pleases-and-only-man-is-vile stuff buzzing around for my taste.

I see the glass half full...but of poison.

I'm too cynical to be an optimist.

Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.

The very large, very respectable, and very knowing class of misanthropes who rejoice in the name of grumblers,--persons who are so sure that the world is going to ruin, that they resent every attempt to comfort them as an insult to their sagacity, and accordingly seek their chief consolation in being inconsolable, their chief pleasure in being displeased.

Artists hold out the mirror to the bruises on the face of the world.

Unfortunately complaining is one thing Eeyores are not afraid to do. They grudgingly carry their thimbles to the Fountain of Life, then mumble and grumble that they weren't given enough.

To take a gloomy view of life is not part of my philosophy; to laugh at the idiocies of my fellow creatures is. However, at this particular moment I cannot find so much to laugh at as I would like.

Realism has always been called cynicism.

I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things.

To all the cynics, I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry you can't believe in miracles. This is a great sporting event and hard work wins it.