Quote

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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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
Formed
Looked
Wonderful
Speedo
Girl
Speedos
Incitement
Riot
Correctly
Wet

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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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.
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
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Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
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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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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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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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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
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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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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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