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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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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
Something
Useful
Really
Missing
Poetry
Especially
Taught
Read
Fact
Pushkin
Facts
Russian
More quotes by Clive James
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
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
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
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
Whoever called snooker chess with balls was rude, but right.
Clive James
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.
Clive James
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
Clive James
If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
Clive James
You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
Clive James
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
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
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.
Clive James
John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
Clive James
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
Clive James
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
Clive James
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
Clive James
Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
Clive James
Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.
Clive James
Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
Clive James