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His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.

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
Head
Resemble
Black
Shaped
Body
Funeral
Going
Caused
Pear
Classic
Situated
Fruit
Pears
Piece
Gown
Pieces
Gowns

More quotes by Clive James

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The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.
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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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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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I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Clive James
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
Clive James
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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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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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.
Clive James
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
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Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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