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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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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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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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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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Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
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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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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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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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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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My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.
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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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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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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
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