Quote

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.

Clive James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Started
Couples
Wife
Recommend
Reading
Finished
Doesn
Activity
Together
Married
Mean
Late
Really
Couple
Quartets
Listening
Beethoven

More quotes by Clive James

Image
You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
Image
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.
Clive James
Image
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
Image
When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.
Clive James
Image
Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
Clive James
Image
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
Clive James
Image
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Clive James
Image
The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.
Clive James
Image
I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
Clive James
Image
The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
Clive James
Image
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
Clive James
Image
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.
Clive James
Image
Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
Clive James
Image
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
Clive James
Image
Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
Clive James
Image
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.
Clive James
Image
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
Clive James
Image
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.
Clive James
Image
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
Image
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James