British - Novelist | August 25, 1942 -
I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.
Howard Jacobson
PeopleThinkYouDownWantRun
As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.
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I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy.
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I should have conceived the idea for 'The Mighty Walzer' earlier. A boy who dreamed of winning fame, fortune, and the adoration of beautiful women as a table-tennis player - shame on me for taking so long to see the mock-heroic possibilities in that.
WomenBeautifulMeWinningLongBoy
The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually.
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Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't.
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The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.
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Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided.
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There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month - I've no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when - fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order - well in order, I presume - to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning.
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There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
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Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.
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Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
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