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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.

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
Much
Especially
Men
Idea
Time
Energy
Think
Young
Thinking
Women
Like
Ideas
Feel
Automatically
Feels
Immortal

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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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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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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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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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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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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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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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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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.
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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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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.
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Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
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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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