Howard Jacobson
There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.Collection: Design
Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional.Collection: Independence
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.Collection: Dad
'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.Collection: Family
Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.
I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you.
Where there are no spectators, there is no sponsorship. Where there is no sponsorship, there is no money. Where there is no money, there are no officials with fingers in the pot. The lesson to be learnt from this is simple. If we want honest sport, we have to stop watching it.
Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.
The queue and the fan are, of course, closely related in that fans will queue any length of time in any weather to see, touch, watch, hear, read, wear, or simply enjoy proximity to the object of their devotion.
Nothing is definite, nothing is finished, nothing is determined.
Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.
For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.
Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'
The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.
You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do.
A book isn't noise to drown out other noise.
If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.
You cannot exercise and be amused about it. You cannot integrate the dying bug into your core workout and hold to the position that you are a spiritual being. In this way, the body and the mind are each other's opposite unto death, which is why you have to choose which of them you are going to follow.
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.
The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect.
The magic word 'Shakespeare' always freezes you in your chair.
Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences - for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal - Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial.
Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.
You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was.
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.
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?
I always, always wanted to be a writer.
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.
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.
I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.
It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it.
It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.
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.
The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.
Passionate dissent from the will of the multitude should be respected, not derided.
The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don't have Italian tailors we can spare here.
There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
The terrorist isn't a problem because he doesn't conform; he's a problem because he does. It's what he conforms to that makes him dangerous.
For my own poor part, I go to great lengths to keep my nostrils sightly.
We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world.
The day I don't attend to my nostrils is the day I will have forsworn that world and become a different person. Someone otherwise preoccupied. Someone who couldn't care less what anyone thinks of his appearance - someone for whom the material life has lost its appeal.
Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn't a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.
You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last.
Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.
Politically it's easy to salve one's conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again.
What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.
Sometimes, a writer's life alone can tell a story.
The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.
As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right.