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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

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
Blamed
Simultaneously
Powerless
Television
Often
Change
World
People
Worsening

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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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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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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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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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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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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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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.
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I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.
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His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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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.
Clive James
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
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It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.
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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.
Clive James