Quote

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.

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
Common
Moving
Speeds
Sense
Humour
Trusted
Without
Speed
Nothing
Lack
Different
Dancing
Thing
Judgment

More quotes by 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
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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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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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The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
Clive James
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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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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.
Clive James
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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
Clive James
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I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.
Clive James
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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Clive James
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
Clive James
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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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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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.
Clive James
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
Clive James
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The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.
Clive James