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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

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
Poetry
Starve
Quite
Starvation
Often
Formula
Writing
Mainly
Formulas
Prose
Critical
Writers

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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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
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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.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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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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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 key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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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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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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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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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
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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.
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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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Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James