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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.

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
Good
Like
Borg
Volvo
Rugged
Sales
Tennis
Dull
Service

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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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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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It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.
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I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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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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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 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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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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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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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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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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