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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

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
Foresight
Hindsight
Inevitable
Effect
Subject
Subjects
Biographer
Effects
Biographers
Belittle

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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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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.
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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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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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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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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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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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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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A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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