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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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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
Interesting
Fear
Writing
Work
Assumption
Reader
Stop
Reading
More quotes by Clive James
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.
Clive James
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
Clive James
If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
Clive James
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
Clive James
Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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
Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
Clive James
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
John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
Clive James
I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.
Clive James
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
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.
Clive James