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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.

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
Rounds
Edges
John
Mcenroe
Building
Imaginary
Looks
Edge
Serving
Tennis
Round

More quotes by Clive James

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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
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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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Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
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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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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.
Clive James
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
Clive James
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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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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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
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
Clive James
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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James