Failing to see the point is not a virtue.
— Howard Jacobson
I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.
Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.
When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.
If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.
Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving.
I am in denial about sport. I refuse to accept that I watch it. I am not the kind of man who watches sport.
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.
If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.
Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.
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.
Love is a brainworm.
A book isn't noise to drown out other noise.
I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.
Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.
There's a lot to be said for misanthropy.
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.
Don't imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference.
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.
A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing.
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.
That a nation's statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances, it doesn't at all imply a continuing reverence.
Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention.
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.
If you want a good life, don't succeed at anything too early or too well. And don't choose a profession that attracts money or attention. The minute people want to see you doing what you do, you're finished.
Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.
Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.
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.
Box-set culture inclines to the hyperbolic.
When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.
Even the wordiest of men know there's a time to button it.
This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up 'Steppenwolf,' and you'll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ, and you'll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you'll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network.
There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month - I've no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when - fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order - well in order, I presume - to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning.
I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself.
Do you want to be strangely various, or do you want to be purely yourself? Either way, revere no one.
There's no law that says you have to be consistent in your preferences.
You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.
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?
A healthy culture doesn't memorialise only those it agrees with.
I wouldn't dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf - which aren't truly sports anyway.
Poets are not meant to be in competition.
It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.
The more educated we are, the less we are prepared to tolerate views contrary to our own.
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.
It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement.
Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair.
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.
You won't get a rational assessment of a political party from a member, and you won't get a reasoned account of the joys of being 'linked' from somebody who's already 'in.'
Rejection is the one constant of human experience.
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.
