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

More quotes by Clive James

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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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A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.
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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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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.
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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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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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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.
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Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
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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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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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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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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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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The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.
Clive James