Howard Jacobson Quotes

My standup is years and years of me working things out on the road. I'm really proud of it! A lot of it is about, well... I don't know why I feel this way, but I feel like every special or show I do is some variation on how I feel like I'm not a girl, not yet a woman.

I'm a woman, but I've been a sexist, too.

Racial humor was about 35% of my act when I first started. But I realized that it was a crutch. What brought it home was when another comedian said to me, 'If you changed color tomorrow, you wouldn't have any material.' He meant it as a put-down, but I took it as a challenge.

I get criticized for a lot of what I write about, but as far as I'm concerned I'm actually standing up and having a look at what goes on in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I'm a man.

One thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood.

I refer to myself as 'we.'

'The Daily Show' forced me out of my comfort zone.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

I never examined my role in male culture, in hyper masculinity. I never examined it, nobody ever called me on it.

He who recites dramatic works makes discoveries about his own character.

There's a book called The Women's Room by Marilyn French that was a really big part of my personal feminist awakening growing up that I read.

It's not going to be about money. It's going to be about who am I, what have I done and where am I going.

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

When you do these things, you sort of take the journey. The journey is all about how I can interweave the Oscar Wilde story, the story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I'm struggling with - my own celebrity, my own life. This is semi-autobiographical in terms of my commitment to this kind of thing.

The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing.

Reading Ehrenreich is good for the soul.

I've learned that asking ourselves not just what we want to be, but who we want to be is important at every stage of our lives, not just when we're starting out in the world. That's because in a way, we're starting out fresh in the world every single day.

How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable role with the promise of rewards -- material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden.

Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

We read books to find out who we are.

I think it is very useful to know ourselves, but when we start naming and labeling, that is dangerous, that gets problematic. It negates that things are always changing. Besides, it's hard to pin a label onto something that's always moving.

Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted, far worse than an autobiography: and its rewards were greater than I expected.