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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.
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
Thinking
Reflect
Exciting
Lucky
Reading
Art
Writing
Things
Amused
Think
Sufficiently
More quotes by Clive James
The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
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
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.
Clive James
A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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
I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.
Clive James
My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.
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
Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
An education without a Bible education is no education.
Clive James
In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
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
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
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
Clive James
Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
Clive James
People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
Clive James
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
Clive James
Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.
Clive James