Quote

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

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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
Come
Line
Jimmy
Lines
Curves
Half
Uses
Use
Tennis
Energy
Ball
Comes
Straight
Connors
Another
Balls
Straightening
Back
Likes
Curve

More quotes by Clive James

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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 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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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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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.
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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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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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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James