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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.

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
Dancing
Nail
Moron
Knocking
Nails
Giant
Giants
Steady
Thump
Endless
Disco

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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.
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My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
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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.
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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.
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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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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.
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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.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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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.
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