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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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
Triumph
Generally
Habit
Civilize
Confirms
Failures
Habits
More quotes by Clive James
You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James
You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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
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.
Clive James
Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
Clive James
Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
Clive James
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
The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.
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
When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.
Clive James
