Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Clive James, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Clive James quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 171 Clive James quotes for you to read and share.

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The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish. -- Clive James
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That amazing thing doesn't need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world. -- Clive James
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If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement. -- Clive James
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I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it. -- Clive James
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Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry. -- Clive James
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The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can't be coherent without being intolerant. -- Clive James
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Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead. -- Clive James
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I think the great trick of doing my sort of thing is to learn to use your downtime, and of course in the media and especially in television, there's a heck of a lot of time of waiting around. And I think the trick is to use that. -- Clive James
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Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It's got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side. I've had everything hurled at me, especially in Australia. Australia is where the tough journalists are. -- Clive James
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Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it. -- Clive James
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Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology. -- Clive James
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In the Bob Hope Golf Classic, the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service. -- Clive James
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a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: "retrospective clairvoyance. -- Clive James
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli. -- Clive James
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Nowadays you have to go pretty far south in Italy before you encounter the widespread belief that any foreign girl is a whore unless her father and two brothers drive her around in an armoured car. -- Clive James
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Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely. -- Clive James
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This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem. -- Clive James
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A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem? -- Clive James
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It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that. -- Clive James
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It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women. -- Clive James
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It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so. -- Clive James
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He committed suicide in 1794 because the Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine. -- Clive James
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The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes. - MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO -- Clive James
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty. -- Clive James
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One of the virtues of the NHS ... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it. -- Clive James
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Why should I waste my imagination on myself? - SERGEI DIAGHILEV -- Clive James
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Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer. -- Clive James
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When virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence. -- Clive James
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He saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse. -- Clive James
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Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there -- Clive James
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I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about. -- Clive James
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. -- Clive James
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The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations. -- Clive James
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Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. - ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL -- Clive James
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Until the end of World War II, Argentina and Australia were running in parallel. -- Clive James
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Today, they separately demonstrate what a luxury it is to be a stable, prosperous, democratic nation with a dependable constitution. -- Clive James
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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it. -- Clive James
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(Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.) -- Clive James
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A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all. -- Clive James
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Some people are different, and so are the rest of us. -- Clive James
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Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail. -- Clive James
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It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane. -- Clive James
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The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas. -- Clive James
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Her novels, which I have not yet read, are usually described as the work of a writer's writer, or perhaps of someone who has been to the Institute for the Theory of Literature in Zagreb. -- Clive James
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The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife. -- Clive James
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She wasn't just beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny. -- Clive James
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Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that. -- Clive James
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Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren't in search of the truth, they're in search of themselves. -- Clive James
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The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same. -- Clive James
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Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it. -- Clive James
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The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood. -- Clive James
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A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro. -- Clive James
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My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast. -- Clive James
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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me. -- Clive James
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Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave. -- Clive James
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Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again. -- Clive James
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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess. -- Clive James
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One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him. -- Clive James
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They had a ... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available. -- Clive James
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts ... -- Clive James
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Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet. -- Clive James
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If you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line. -- Clive James
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All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish. -- Clive James
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Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: It's about to make me a lot of money. -- Clive James
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And he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue). -- Clive James
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It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place. -- Clive James
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A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered. -- Clive James
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My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading. -- Clive James
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I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind. -- Clive James
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If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive. -- Clive James
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My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin. -- Clive James
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Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money. -- Clive James
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The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB -- Clive James
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Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film. -- Clive James
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Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick. -- Clive James
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I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates ... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was. -- Clive James
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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine. -- Clive James
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits. -- Clive James
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A sense of humour is common sense dancing. -- Clive James
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In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake. -- Clive James
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In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple. -- Clive James
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The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread. -- Clive James
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Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. - COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.): -- Clive James
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Australia is all that and more, and Argentina, after yet another implosion of the civil order, is once again none of it and less. -- Clive James
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power. -- Clive James
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In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it, it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy. - VIRGINIO ROGNONI, -- Clive James
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him. -- Clive James
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All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. -- Clive James
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People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways. -- Clive James
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Snooker is just chess with balls. -- Clive James
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In London there was no home cooking worthy of the name. When you were in funds you ate out. But only the people whose faces appeared in such publications as Town and Queen could afford to eat in restaurants serving food which would leave them looking and feeling better instead of worse. -- Clive James
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When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in. -- Clive James
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Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza. -- Clive James
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The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS. -- Clive James
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She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short. -- Clive James
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building. -- Clive James
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The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life. -- Clive James
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His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral. -- Clive James
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The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag. -- Clive James
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Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves. -- Clive James
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If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do. -- Clive James
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Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective. -- Clive James
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(Of Marilyn Monroe) She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short -- Clive James
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I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time. -- Clive James
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned. -- Clive James
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Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I, -- Clive James
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Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones. -- Clive James
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart. -- Clive James
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All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness. -- Clive James
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Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say. -- Clive James
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I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California. -- Clive James
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I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them. -- Clive James
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A LL THE ENTRIES in Freud's diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long. -- Clive James
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When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob. -- Clive James
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And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days. - DRIEU LA ROCHELLE, -- Clive James
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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot. -- Clive James
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Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff. -- Clive James
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Any of the kneeling girls who fell over was taken away to be gassed, -- Clive James
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight. -- Clive James
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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world. -- Clive James
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Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write ... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me. -- Clive James
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Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing. -- Clive James
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire. -- Clive James
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Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality. -- Clive James
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I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something. -- Clive James
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water. -- Clive James
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Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping. -- Clive James
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You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo. -- Clive James
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I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did. -- Clive James
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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead! -- Clive James
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As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that. -- Clive James
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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages. -- Clive James
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Reading and writing ... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect ... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused. -- Clive James
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Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.) -- Clive James
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As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce. -- Clive James
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are. -- Clive James
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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better. -- Clive James
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In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate. -- Clive James
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The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished -- Clive James
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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation. -- Clive James
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When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious. -- Clive James
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An education without a Bible education is no education. -- Clive James
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a poem is never finished, only abandoned, -- Clive James
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Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides. -- Clive James
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds ... What do they think of in the other nine? -- Clive James
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Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty - it makes them indispensable - -- Clive James
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The damaging notion that obscure is the way philosophy should sound. -- Clive James
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If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one. -- Clive James
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Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring. -- Clive James
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he was a slave labourer under the Nazis, -- Clive James
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As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks -- Clive James
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The secret for an artist is to make that a subject and not bang your head against the wall and give up. But to turn it into and treat the new subject matter, which is one's own vanishing. -- Clive James
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A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds. -- Clive James
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Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive. -- Clive James
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out. -- Clive James
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Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. - WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, -- Clive James
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There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. -- Clive James
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Roscoe Tanner seems to have found a way of making his service go even faster, so that the ball is now quite invisible, like Stealth, the American supersonic bomber which nobody has ever seen. -- Clive James
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped. -- Clive James
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Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration. -- Clive James
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A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't -- Clive James
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I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them. -- Clive James
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail. -- Clive James
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull. -- Clive James
Clive James Quotes : pic 001755994
Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right. -- Clive James
Clive James Quotes : pic 001760903
Finally you get to the age when a book's power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it. -- Clive James
Clive James Quotes : pic 001764026
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour. -- Clive James
Clive James Quotes : pic 001773630
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art. -- Clive James
Clive James Quotes : pic 001828209
Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier. -- Clive James
Clive James Quotes : pic 001864235
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting. -- Clive James
Clive James Quotes : pic 001873117
thumbnail sketch of his life would include two main facts: -- Clive James