Clive James Quotes

#1. It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.

Clive James

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.

Clive James

#5. 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

#6. I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.

Clive James

#7. Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.

Clive James

#8. The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can't be coherent without being intolerant.

Clive James

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

Clive James

#12. Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

Clive James

#13. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)

Clive James

#14. a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: "retrospective clairvoyance.

Clive James

#15. Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive.

Clive James

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts ...

Clive James

#19. 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

#20. There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.

Clive James

#21. Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

Clive James

#22. 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

#23. A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.

Clive James

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.

Clive James

#27. Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. - WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Clive James

#28. All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.

Clive James

#29. A sense of humour is common sense dancing.

Clive James

#30. 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

#31. A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.

Clive James

#32. Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty - it makes them indispensable -

Clive James

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

Clive James

#37. 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

#38. a poem is never finished, only abandoned,

Clive James

#39. 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

#40. An education without a Bible education is no education.

Clive James

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.

Clive James

#45. You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

Clive James

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. The damaging notion that obscure is the way philosophy should sound.

Clive James

#49. John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.

Clive James

#50. Any of the kneeling girls who fell over was taken away to be gassed,

Clive James

#51. 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

#52. Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.

Clive James

#53. 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

#54. Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.

Clive James

#55. Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.

Clive James

#56. All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

Clive James

#57. 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

#58. Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. - ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL

Clive James

#59. And he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue).

Clive James

#60. They had a ... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.

Clive James

#61. Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.

Clive James

#62. 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

#63. Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right.

Clive James

#64. 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

#65. Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.

Clive James

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

Clive James

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

Clive James

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Until the end of World War II, Argentina and Australia were running in parallel.

Clive James

#79. First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

Clive James

#80. 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

#81. The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

Clive James

#82. 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

#83. I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

Clive James

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.

Clive James

#88. Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

Clive James

#89. Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.

Clive James

#90. Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)

Clive James

#91. And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days. - DRIEU LA ROCHELLE,

Clive James

#92. 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

#93. Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

Clive James

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. If you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line.

Clive James

#98. 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

#99. A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't

Clive James

#100. 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