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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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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
Made
Shirts
Mafia
Men
Classic
Buyers
Think
Impulse
Shoe
Thinking
Insane
Split
People
Shoes
Splits
Sports
Retired
Almost
Shirt
Better
Worn
Buyer

More quotes by Clive James

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Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.
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I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about.
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When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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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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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
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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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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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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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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
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Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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