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

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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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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.
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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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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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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.
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John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
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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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If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.
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Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
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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.
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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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Snooker is just chess with balls.
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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.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.
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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
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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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