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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
Subject
Subjects
Biographer
Effects
Biographers
Belittle
Foresight
Hindsight
Inevitable
Effect
More quotes by Clive James
People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
Clive James
The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
Clive James
I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James
Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
Clive James
A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
Clive James
Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
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
Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
Clive James
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Clive James
The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
Clive James