“The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die ...” — Howard Jacobson Quote

The environment in which I studied was so safe, I thought I would die from the boredom of it.

I have never met an intelligent optimist. That is not to say I think pessimism makes you intelligent, but I have always felt like an Old Testament Jeremiah or Cassandra from ancient Greece. I want to run down the streets warning people.

Ideally, I would like everyone in the world to read and love my novels. In fact, I can't believe that everyone in the world doesn't love them. What is there not to love?

Nostalgic myself, I am a sucker for other men's nostalgia.

Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.

The main thing I got from growing up in a suburb is the boredom you have as a child.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

I hate finality, there is too much uncertainty and boredom affiliated with 'the rest of time.'

I think baseball represents something closer to our experience. There's no clock in baseball; it's not over until it's over. It's like life in that there are prolonged periods of boredom and monotony, punctuated by intense moments of excitement and sometimes terror.

Around the year 2000, countries such as France, the Netherlands and the US were already five times as wealthy as in 1930. Yet nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.