Quote

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

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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
World
Public
Clock
Around
Towns
Impossibly
Part
London
Booth
America
Seemed
Guarded
Look
Clean
Telephone
Looks
Streets
Telephones
Would
Modern
Comparison
Like
Least
Town

More quotes by Clive James

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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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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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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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Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.
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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.
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The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.
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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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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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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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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 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.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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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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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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Nationwide featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers
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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.
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Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.
Clive James