Howard Jacobson quotes:

I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

I suspect you're thinking of Pascal,' Finkler said, finally.'Only he said the opposite. He said you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist...' 'You're in the shit.

The perfect bacon sandwich is on white bread, very soft and very thick. Sourdough with a good crust. The bacon is half way to being crispy - and there's lots of it - and enough brown sauce to trickle down your arm. You've not really enjoyed a bacon sandwich unless 10 minutes later you're still licking your wrists.

I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.

To bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree."

A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.

All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?

Although I was too young to understand the theory of universal (that's to say male) guilt, I was old enough to know which sex suffered migraine and which sex caused it.

How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.

How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it.

It's never over till it's over with a friend.

Marriage is like a barbecue. When you light a barbecue, it's very exciting to see the flames. That's lovely, but you have to wait until the flames have died down. Everything that you want from a barbecue happens on the hot embers. You can't cook on those flames.

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.