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

More quotes by Clive James

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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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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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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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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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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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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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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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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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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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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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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
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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.
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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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
Clive James
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His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
Clive James
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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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.
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