Quote

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

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
Music
Machine
Writing
Sounds
Like
Machines
Humphrey
Star
Washing
Played
Writes
Stars
Backwards
Sound
Theme
War
Wars

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Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
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His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
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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.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
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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.
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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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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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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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Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
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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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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
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