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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.

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
Justice
Privileges
Class
Deprived
Privileged
Diversity
Privilege
Essence
Conscious
System
Deprivation

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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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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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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.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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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
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I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.
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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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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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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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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.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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