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
Incitement
Riot
Correctly
Wet
Formed
Looked
Wonderful
Speedo
Girl
Speedos

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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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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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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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The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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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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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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When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.
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I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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