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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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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
Girl
Meat
Scrap
Stuff
Dinner
Adding
Way
England
Pathetic
Hunks
Girls
Dishes
Edible
Bits
Transformed
Hunk
Ways
Australia
Scraps
Secret
Britain
Heating
Funny
Humorous
Upstairs

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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
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My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.
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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 an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.
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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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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.
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When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.
Clive James
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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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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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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James