Quote

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

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
Better
Think
Thinking
Fraction
Fractions
Probably
Use
Energy

More quotes by Clive James

Image
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.
Clive James
Image
Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
Clive James
Image
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
Image
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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
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
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
Clive James
Image
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Clive James
Image
Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.
Clive James
Image
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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
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
The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
Clive James
Image
A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
Clive James
Image
She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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
I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
Clive James
Image
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
Clive James
Image
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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