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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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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
Finding
Grammar
Standards
Languages
Later
Vocabulary
Learned
Added
Read
German
Language
European
Cambridge
Way
Standard
Spanish
Good
Findings
Laboratory

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Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.
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The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
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An education without a Bible education is no education.
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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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You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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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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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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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.
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You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.
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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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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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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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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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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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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.
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