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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

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
Corrupted
Tendencies
Corruption
Ideology
Intellectual
Power
Consort

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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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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.
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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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.
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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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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.
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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.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
Clive James