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Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

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
Tower
Towers
Jack
Tremendous
Strength
Read
Always
Aubrey

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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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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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Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
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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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Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
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A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
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Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
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When I was very young, one of my favourite books was Captain's Courageous and I suppose one of the reasons I loved it, it was a life I knew I should have had, learning all the different bits of the ship and learning to catch fish and rig sails and to -all the things that I never learned and I never learned the discipline, but I hungered after it.
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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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All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
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A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
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Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
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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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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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Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
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Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.
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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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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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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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Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
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