Clive James Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Clive James
Clive James Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Clive James on Wise Famous Quotes.
a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: "retrospective clairvoyance.
It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women.
One of the virtues of the NHS ... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it.
Finally you get to the age when a book's power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.
They had a ... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
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.
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.
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.
Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.
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.
That amazing thing doesn't need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.
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.
A LL THE ENTRIES in Freud's diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long.
And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days. - DRIEU LA ROCHELLE,
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.
Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. - WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,
Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty - it makes them indispensable -
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.
Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)
A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
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.
(Of Marilyn Monroe) She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short
Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.
Today, they separately demonstrate what a luxury it is to be a stable, prosperous, democratic nation with a dependable constitution.
Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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.
Australia is all that and more, and Argentina, after yet another implosion of the civil order, is once again none of it and less.
I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.
In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it, it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy. - VIRGINIO ROGNONI,
The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB
She wasn't just beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny.
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.
A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.