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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

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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
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

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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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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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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
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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.
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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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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.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
Clive James
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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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Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
Clive James
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
Clive James
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Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
Clive James
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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Clive James