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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
Abstracted
Midget
Monroe
Marilyn
Short
Reason
Good
Midgets

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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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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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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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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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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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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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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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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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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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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.
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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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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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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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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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