“It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had,...” — Howard Jacobson Quote

It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower.

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.

For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

At moments of acute joy or sorrow, men and women throughout history have sung or reached for musical instruments to express the inexpressible. When minds are taut with emotional entanglement, there seems to be an inner compulsive instinct to release and harness this tension through the measured vibrations in the air that we call music.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc.

Domestic violent extremism is the most acute threat, terrorism-related threat that we are seeing to our homeland.