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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

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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
Since
Popular
Society
Blame
Fact
Artists
Artist
Among
Facts
Nobody
Without
Talent
Marxism
Always
Wants
Enables
Hear
Classic

More quotes by Clive James

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Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.
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The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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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.
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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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Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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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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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
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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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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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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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.
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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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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.
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