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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.

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
Liner
Transport
Surrounded
Luxury
Water
Play
Really

More quotes by Clive James

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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
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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.
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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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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
Clive James
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If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.
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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Clive James
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
Clive James
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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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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James
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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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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
Clive James
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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
Clive James
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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
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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
Clive James
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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James
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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
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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
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
Clive James
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
Clive James