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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.

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

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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about.
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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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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Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
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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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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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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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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 work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
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Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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