Quote

Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.

Clive James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
People
Burning
Minus
Succeed
Tasted
Greater
Cigarettes
Funny
Cigar
Savour
Money
Cigarette
Fumes
Firsts
Ritual
Compulsive
First
Smoking
Smoked
Like
Humorous
Succeeding

More quotes by Clive James

Image
Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
Clive James
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
Clive James
Image
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.
Clive James
Image
Nationwide featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers
Clive James
Image
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.
Clive James
Image
She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
Clive James
Image
If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.
Clive James
Image
I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James
Image
An education without a Bible education is no education.
Clive James
Image
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
Image
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.
Clive James
Image
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Clive James
Image
I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about.
Clive James
Image
Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
Clive James
Image
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Clive James
Image
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