Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.
It's always nice to be praised, and insofar as a prize is a form of praise, you're glad when you get it.
To a philosopher like Nietzsche, the Jew is culpable not for rejecting Christianity but for inventing it.
The painter Sidney Nolan once told me I tried too hard. Advice I've been trying hard to follow ever since.
I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport.
The Stop The War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy.
If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly.
All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?
When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.
Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.'
Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.
'Family Guy'. It's not only the funniest programme on television, it's the most wonderfully, indecorously literate.
Non-conformity has always been one of the great British virtues, and that includes non-conformity to things British.
What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.
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 trivial novel has been written about an important subject, and many a profound one about nothing in particular.
I hear Shakespeare, sometimes, the way other people might hear God or Marx or something. But he's so different from that.
Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.
I've always felt as much outside the Jewish experience as in it. It astonished my family that I wrote about things Jewish.
There mustn't be a moment when we turn on the TV and think, 'There's Trump in the White House' - that must never feel normal.
You can have your country and be pleased to welcome others to it. You can have your country and still enjoy living elsewhere.
One should take writers' valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow.
I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them.
The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually.
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'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.
Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention.
If we declare ourselves, as readers, to be on the side of life, the question has to be asked what sort of life we are on the side of.
It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't.
To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else.
Let discernment in matters of fashion and entertainment determine who should get the vote, and half the country would be disenfranchised.
People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn't funny at all. It's appalling and tragic.
It's not only teenagers who think they look good in pre-holed jeans, and I doubt it's only the superannuated who are amused by Ant and Dec.
Let's be honest with one another: almost everything is too long except life, and I know people who wouldn't even concur with that exception.
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.
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.
Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe.
Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.
One of my agents once said I was one of the most dangerous men in London, and I was so excited by that. For a few days, I walked around Soho snarling.
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.
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.
Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan.
Maybe we'd forgotten what socialists are meant to look and sound like. Well, now we've been reminded. They're meant to look and sound like Jeremy Corbyn.
'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.
If it's bathos you want - and I suspect we are all bathos junkies in the end - nothing gives it to you quite like watching sport. Unless it's playing sport.
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.
Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children.
One of the great things about us Jews is that we tell the best jokes. Part of the reason is we tell jokes against ourselves - before anyone else gets to do it.
I once belonged to a health club, where it cost me £2,000 a year to amble on a treadmill for half an hour a week and sit and read Grazia in the cooling-off area.
Certainly a curtain has never fallen too soon for me. Every play is too long, even the short ones. Every concert, every film, every television programme the same.