Clive James Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Clive James
Clive James Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Clive James quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.
— Clive James
The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
— Clive James
It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.
— Clive James
Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
— Clive James
An education without a Bible education is no education.
— Clive James
Finally you get to the age when a book's power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.
— Clive James
Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
— Clive James
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
— Clive James
They had a ... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.
— Clive James
I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
— Clive James
A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
— Clive James
Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
— Clive James
Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.
— 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
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.
— Clive James
A sense of humour is common sense dancing.
— Clive James
The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished
— Clive James
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
— Clive James
Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.
— Clive James
And he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue).
— Clive James
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
— Clive James
Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.
— Clive James
(Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)
— Clive James
The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.
— Clive James
I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.
— Clive James
Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)
— Clive James
Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.
— Clive James
That amazing thing doesn't need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.
— Clive James
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.
— Clive James
Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive.
— Clive James
a poem is never finished, only abandoned,
— Clive James
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
— Clive James
Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I,
— Clive James
Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
— Clive James
John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
— Clive James
Clive Owen would be a fantastic James Bond. Any man who does it will have to weigh his odds - whether he can get in and get out.
— Pierce Brosnan
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
— Clive James
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
— Clive James
The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can't be coherent without being intolerant.
— Clive James
(Of Marilyn Monroe) She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short
— Clive James
Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.
— 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
The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB
— Clive James
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
— 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
he was a slave labourer under the Nazis,
— Clive James