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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
Facts
Russian
Something
Useful
Really
Missing
Poetry
Especially
Taught
Read
Fact
Pushkin

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I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
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Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
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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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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.
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She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.
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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.
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First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
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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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It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
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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.
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Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.
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The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
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Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.
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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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Nationwide featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
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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.
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I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.
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