Howard Jacobson Quotes

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

Shakespeare's work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.

Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

Shakespeare was completely fictionalising the people who were then the great celebrities of English.

Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.

Shakespeare's always on my dance card if it can be.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.

I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.

Shakespeare is definitely my first love.

I'm sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube.

It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Marquez.

The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.

I always consider Shakespeare like a huge room. I mean, you open the door, and you can go anywhere.

Rowling is a luminous storyteller. I love her sense of humor and the intricate wizarding world she built around Hogwarts. I think all writers aspire to be like her, to capture readers like she does. But I didn't think about 'Harry Potter' when I wrote 'The Bone Season.'

I want to be known as 'The Big Shakespeare.' It was Shakespeare that said, 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them.'