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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
Consort
Corrupted
Tendencies
Corruption
Ideology
Intellectual
Power

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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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 essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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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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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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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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Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
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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.
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It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
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The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.
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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.
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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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