Top 100 Quotes About Clive James
#1. he took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as practised by Clive James, Gore Vidal, and Michael Foot.
Duncan Wu
#2. (...) life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens... Stories solve this problem - as the critic Clive James once put it, 'Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.' This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.
Paul Bloom
#3. I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on."
Tom Courtenay
#4. It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.
Clive James
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.
Clive James
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
Clive James
#13. Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
Clive James
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James
#17. Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
Clive James
#18. The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can't be coherent without being intolerant.
Clive James
#19. If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.
Clive James
#20. Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
Clive James
#26. Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Clive James
#27. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)
Clive James
#28. a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: "retrospective clairvoyance.
Clive James
#29. Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive.
Clive James
#30. 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
#31. Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I,
Clive James
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.
Clive James
#35. Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts ...
Clive James
#36. 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
#37. There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.
Clive James
#38. Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Clive James
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
#42. 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
#43. Today, they separately demonstrate what a luxury it is to be a stable, prosperous, democratic nation with a dependable constitution.
Clive James
#44. A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.
Clive James
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
Clive James
#48. Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. - WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,
Clive James
#49. All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.
Clive James
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
Clive James
#53. A sense of humour is common sense dancing.
Clive James
#54. 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
#55. A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
Clive James
#56. Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty - it makes them indispensable -
Clive James
#57. Why should I waste my imagination on myself? - SERGEI DIAGHILEV
Clive James
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
Clive James
#61. On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Clive James
#62. 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
#63. Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds ... What do they think of in the other nine?
Clive James
#64. 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
#65. You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
#66. 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
#67. a poem is never finished, only abandoned,
Clive James
#68. 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
#69. She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Clive James
#70. (Of Marilyn Monroe) She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short
Clive James
#71. Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
Clive James
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. An education without a Bible education is no education.
Clive James
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB
Clive James
#78. Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides.
Clive James
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
Clive James
#83. The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished
Clive James
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
Clive James
#87. You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.
Clive James
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. The damaging notion that obscure is the way philosophy should sound.
Clive James
#91. John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
Clive James
#92. Any of the kneeling girls who fell over was taken away to be gassed,
Clive James
#93. Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
Clive James
#94. 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
#95. Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.
Clive James
#96. Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. - COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.):
Clive James
#97. As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks
Clive James
#98. 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
#99. he was a slave labourer under the Nazis,
Clive James
#100. 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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