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

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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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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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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
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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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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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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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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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Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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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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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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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 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.
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