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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

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
Anyone
Never
Mahler
Listens
Composer
Forty
Trust

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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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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 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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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
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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.
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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
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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.
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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.
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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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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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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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.
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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Clive James