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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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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
Midget
Monroe
Marilyn
Short
Reason
Good
Midgets
Abstracted

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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.
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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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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
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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.
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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.
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I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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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.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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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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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 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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If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.
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