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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.

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
Think
Seems
Thinking
Persons
Wary
Life
Person
Justified
People
Wells
Third
Might
Thirds
Well
Rule
Matter
Seem
Good
Company

More quotes by Clive James

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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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.
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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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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
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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.
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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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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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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.
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The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
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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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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
Clive James