Knowledge Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
People keep saying you can't satirize Trump because he's beyond satire, but it's not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
I find Australia compelling and vexatious at the best of times; I've never been able to get it out of my system since going there as a young lecturer, and yet however much I love revisiting it, I always feel I have to leave again.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
'J' is a novel. A story about what it is like for people after a terrible event. And it is a love story, because I feel a novel is inevitably a love story.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
'Legality' is a mad phrase to use when it comes to the founding of nations. Australia was founded on illegality. For the Americans to go in and dispossess the American Indians was illegal.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
In anticipation of a meal - supposing we are with the ideal companion at the best table in the perfect restaurant - we might indeed postpone sadness. And maybe even halfway through, we will remain in tolerably high spirits, with dessert still to come. But as we near the end of eating, we begin to feel anticipatory twinges of anticlimax.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
If the great thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone, the bad thing about the Internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
I have made of Sydney, to which I sailed in 1965, a paradise beyond the powers of fancy.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that's new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world - block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Everything is susceptible to corruption of one sort or another - humanity is one big cheat - but it matters particularly with sport, which ceases to be itself the minute the outcome's rigged.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
To be clear, I abhor the separation wall. It is an eyesore in itself and makes tangible the failed diplomacy and cruel short-sightedness that causes such misery in the region. No Palestinian can see that wall and not wonder if the Israelis mean it to stay there forever, a constant reminder of what they never intend to change.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket - a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney - the world was all before me.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
I won't go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally, someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
I was brought up a Jew but, you know, that way of being Jewish - the New York way. We were stomach Jews; we were Jewish-joke Jews. We were bagel Jews. We didn't go to synagogue. I'm frightened of synagogue to this day.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
Artless fairy stories enchant us in our first years and retain their hold on us until our last.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
We shouldn't be too hard on vanity. It can be a mark of respect for the world.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
As a young man, I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It's important to get your operas right.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson
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.
Quote by -Howard Jacobson