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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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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.
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Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.
Clive James
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I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
Clive James
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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
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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
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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.
Clive James
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
Clive James
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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
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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