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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
Powerless
Television
Often
Change
World
People
Worsening
Blamed
Simultaneously

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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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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.
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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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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.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.
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My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.
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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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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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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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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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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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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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Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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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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