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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
California
Smoke
Miss
Missing
Nobody
Going
Smokes
Like
Restaurants
Smoking

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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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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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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.
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Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.
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The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.
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His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
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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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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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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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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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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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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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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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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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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
Clive James