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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
Witty
Machines
Computer
Technology
Powerful
Wrong
Science
Remind
More quotes by Clive James
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James
Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.
Clive James
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
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
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
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
She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
Clive James
A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
Clive James
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
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
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
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
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
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
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
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
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
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
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
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Clive James