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

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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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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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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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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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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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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.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.
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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.
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Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
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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.
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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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