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

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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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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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Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.
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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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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
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Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.
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Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.
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Nationwide featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers
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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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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.
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The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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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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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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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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