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Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

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
Sick
Childhood
Behinds
Behind
Prisoner

More quotes by Clive James

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The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
Clive James
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Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
Clive James
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
Clive James
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Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
Clive James
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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
Clive James