Clive James Quotes & Sayings

The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can't be coherent without being intolerant. — Clive James

Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds ... What do they think of in the other nine? — Clive James

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

The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level ... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy. — Clive James

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

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

Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides. — Clive James

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

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked
By various diseases of the intellect
Or failing body. How am I still upright?
And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night.

How did it come to this? How else but through
The course of years, and what its workings do
To wood, stone, glass and almost all the metals,
Smouldering already in the fresh rose petals.

Our energy deceived us. Blessed with the knack
To get things done, we thought to get it back
Each time we lost it, just by taking breath -
And some of us are racing yet as we face death.

Well, good to see you. Sorry I have to fly.
I'm struggling with a deadline, God knows why,
And ghosts keep interrupting. Think of me
The way I do of you. Quite often. Constantly. — Clive James

Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire. — Clive James

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

"Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers. — Clive James

As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, 'Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.' I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can't be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized. — Clive James

Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza. — Clive James

And he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue). — Clive James

On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot. — Clive James

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

A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered. — Clive James

A decade ago, critics suggested biotech crops would not be valuable in the developing world. Now 90 percent of farmers who benefit are resource-poor farmers in developing countries. These helped alleviate 7.7 million subsistence farmers in China, India, South Africa, the Philippines from abject poverty. — Clive James

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

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

You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart. — Clive James

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

The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned. — Clive James

The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished — Clive James

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

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

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

Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality. — Clive James

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

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

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

Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person ... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away. — Clive James

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

Why should I waste my imagination on myself? - SERGEI DIAGHILEV — Clive James

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

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

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

a poem is never finished, only abandoned, — Clive James

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

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand. — Clive James

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness. — Clive James

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

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn't have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows. - GOLO MANN, GESCHICHTE UND GESCHICHTEN, P. 170 — Clive James

Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him. — Clive James

Some people are different, and so are the rest of us. — Clive James

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping. — Clive James

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight. — Clive James

A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water. — Clive James

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

There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. — Clive James

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

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short. — Clive James

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff. — Clive James

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

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

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

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out. — Clive James

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

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

Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film. — Clive James

When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it. — Clive James

It is isn't easy to make someone who hasn't experienced it understand what it feels like, this martyrdom of being judged, devalued, disqualified, and misrepresented by journalists writing in haste who are bored by reading and who, for that matter, hardly ever read anything anyway. - WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, — Clive James

Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring. — Clive James

When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog. — Clive James

In the twelfth century the Basque fishermen of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with the consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view it is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did. — Clive James

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

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

In the movies first impressions are everything. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right. — Clive James

thumbnail sketch of his life would include two main facts: — Clive James

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

Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits. — Clive James

And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew. — Clive James

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

When virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence. — Clive James

Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I, — Clive James

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

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

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

Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty - it makes them indispensable - — Clive James

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

What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. — Clive James

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world. — Clive James

Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. - COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.): — Clive James

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

The repeat run of Fawlty Towers drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of The Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics. — Clive James

When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in. — Clive James

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

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

he was a slave labourer under the Nazis, — Clive James

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

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology. — Clive James

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

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli. — Clive James

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

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

Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive. — Clive James

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. - ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL — Clive James

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

(Of Marilyn Monroe) She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short — Clive James