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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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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
Ends
Aged
Ever
Wood
Made
Woods
Kind
Move
Would
Already
Like
Looking
Smartest
Start
Wreck
Moving
Wrecks

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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
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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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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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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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Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
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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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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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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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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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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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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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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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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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