British - Novelist | August 25, 1942 -
The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.
Howard Jacobson
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Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.
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For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.
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With 'J', at a deep base level, there is still some comedy, but that masculinist voice that had driven so many of my novels I suddenly did not want to occupy. I wasn't reneging on it; I just didn't want to do it.
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You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was.
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'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.
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It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it.
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There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools... They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding.
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I always, always wanted to be a writer.
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That's the great test: if you're going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you've got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?
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The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair.
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I have a son, but I've never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting.
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