British - Novelist | August 25, 1942 -
Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.
Howard Jacobson
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I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.
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If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.
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If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?
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Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.
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When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.
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You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.
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A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.
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Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.
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There's no law that says you have to be consistent in your preferences.
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It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius.
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I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.
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