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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

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
World
Afraid
Television
Probably
Wisdom
Anyone
Community
Doe
Thinking
Thinks

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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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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
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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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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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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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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.
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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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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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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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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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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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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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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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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 luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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