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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
Privilege
Essence
Conscious
Deprivation
System
Privileges
Justice
Deprived
Class
Privileged
Diversity

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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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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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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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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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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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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
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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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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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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.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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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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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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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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Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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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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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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