Quote

Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.

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
Sometimes
Spots
Douglas
Feels
Stealing
Wrap
Would
Treasure
Pirate
Like
Head
Cave
Around
Wraps
Become
Caves
Young
Spot
Feel
Poems
Assembling

More quotes by Clive James

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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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The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.
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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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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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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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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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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Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.
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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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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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My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.
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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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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.
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It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
Clive James
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
Clive James