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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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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
Building
Visitors
Public
Buildings
Tell
Marvelous
Able
Soviet
Look
Union
Come
Unions
Decipher
Without
Stuck
Advertisements
Looks
Telling
Alphabet
More quotes by Clive James
Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.
Clive James
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
Clive James
People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
Clive James
Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.
Clive James
You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
Clive James
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Clive James
Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Nationwide featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers
Clive James
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
Clive James
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Clive James
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
A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
