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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

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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
Human
Perspective
Humans
Shall
Wonderful
Secret
Rather
Desire
Grandly
Individual
Secrets
Young
Mature

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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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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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The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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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 key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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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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It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
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If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.
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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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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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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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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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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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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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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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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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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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I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Clive James