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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
Power
Consort
Corrupted
Tendencies
Corruption
Ideology
Intellectual

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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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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.
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A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
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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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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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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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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.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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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.
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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.
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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
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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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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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.
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