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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.

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
Smoking
California
Smoke
Miss
Missing
Nobody
Going
Smokes
Like
Restaurants

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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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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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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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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.
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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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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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If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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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 love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.
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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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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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My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.
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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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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Clive James
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.
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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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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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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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