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People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

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
Ahead
Poetry
Writing
Much
Good
People
Anyways
Stopped

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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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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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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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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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Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.
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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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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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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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Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.
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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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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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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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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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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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I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
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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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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
Clive James