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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
Simultaneously
Powerless
Television
Often
Change
World
Worsening
People
Blamed

More quotes by Clive James

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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.
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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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My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.
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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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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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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
Clive James
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.
Clive James
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I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James