Howard Jacobson

“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.”

“I've never owned a T-shirt. I don't like vests or sweaters or cardies with zips. I like a proper shirt with a collar. There's nothing else that I think I look nice in. I don't think there's anything else that other men look nice in, to be honest. Things with words on! Can you imagine? On grown-ups! Words are to make books with.”

“Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making.”

“Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.”

“Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.”

“Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love?”

“Rejection is the one constant of human experience.”

“No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller ever gets to a more wonderful place.”

“It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears.”

“There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.”

“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.”

“You are changed by the people you are closest to, and this has allowed me to forgive myself for the person I once was.”

“Many a woman has suffered at the hands of a Paul Morel. There's more than one way of being brutal.”

“Love is a brainworm.”

“It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it.”

“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.”

“Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing.”

“If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly.”

“Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.”

“Words do not necessarily make us moral. And there have been presidents before who have stumbled over syntax and looked foolish when the words they have been forced to speak have been their own. But Trump is uniquely stunted. A child listening to two of his speeches could reproduce a third without the use of a dictionary.”