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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.

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
Later
Early
Interesting
Artist
Good
Phase
Phases

More quotes by Clive James

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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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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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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 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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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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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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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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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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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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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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 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
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
Clive James
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
Clive James
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I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James