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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.

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
Fractions
Probably
Use
Energy
Better
Think
Thinking
Fraction

More quotes by Clive James

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On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Clive James
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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.
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
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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
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The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.
Clive James
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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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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.
Clive James
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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
Clive James
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The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
Clive James
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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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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
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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Clive James
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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
Clive James
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James
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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.
Clive James