Howard Jacobson Quotes

As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is they let you write stories that sometimes end up almost half a book.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

A book makes claims of literary art.

Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination.

Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.