Howard Jacobson : (9)

" I wouldn’t suppose for one moment that there’s a single one of Trump’s voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs. " - Howard Jacobson

" A healthy culture doesn’t memorialise only those it agrees with. " - Howard Jacobson

" I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things. " - Howard Jacobson

" The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I’ve been trying hard to follow ever since. " - Howard Jacobson

" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. " - Howard Jacobson

" The young come in many guises: vigorous and passionate, vindictive and mean-spirited. And not every person over 65 is dozing in a retirement home. " - Howard Jacobson

" The novel is a thing of irony and ambiguity. That’s at the heart of ‘J’, a world that has stopped arguing with itself. We have to keep our equilibrium of hate, which is argument. But on the Internet, you find a unanimity of response, and in ‘J,’ there’s a fear of that, that discourse becomes a statement of political or ideological belief. " - Howard Jacobson

" Trump’s hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift. " - Howard Jacobson

" It is a nonsense to me when people come along and tell me not to be pessimistic; or that culture has always been going to the bad. Well, yes, it has, and it is an author’s job to point it out. " - Howard Jacobson