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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.

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
Writing
Performer
Closely
Performers
Performing
Performance
Performances
Writer
Art
Aligned

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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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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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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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.
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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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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.
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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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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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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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Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.
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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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A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
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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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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James