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
Wet
Formed
Looked
Wonderful
Speedo
Girl
Speedos
Incitement
Riot
Correctly

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Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
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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 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.
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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.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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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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In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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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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I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.
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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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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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I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Clive James
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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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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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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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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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.
Clive James