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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.

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
Causes
Else
Snob
Thought
Australia
Young
Dull
Littles
Believed
Anything
Blessed
Little
Except
Never
Cause

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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.
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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
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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
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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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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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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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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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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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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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