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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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Clive James
Age: 80 †
Born: 1939
Born: October 7
Died: 2019
Died: November 24
Author
Broadcaster
Literary Critic
Poet
Television Presenter
Writer
Kogarah
New South Wales
Australia
Clive Vivian Leopold James
Clive Vivian James
Science
Remind
Witty
Machines
Computer
Technology
Powerful
Wrong

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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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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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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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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Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
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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.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
Clive James
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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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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.
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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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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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
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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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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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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
Clive James