Clive James famous quotes

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
-- Clive James

#Witty #Powerful #Science

A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.
-- Clive James

#Good Life #Life Is #Fame

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
-- Clive James

#Wisdom #Fiction #Dull

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
-- Clive James

#Confusion #Way #Abstract

The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.
-- Clive James

#Food #People #Ordinary People

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.
-- Clive James

#Memorable #Poetry #Sound

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
-- Clive James

#Poetry #Trying #Literature

Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.
-- Clive James

#Triumph #Habit

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks
-- Clive James

#Wisdom #Art #Australia

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.
-- Clive James

#Art #Reading #Writing

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.
-- Clive James

#Art #Writing #Years

The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy.
-- Clive James

#Art #New York #Believe

Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.
-- Clive James

#Stupid #Men #Personality

A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
-- Clive James

#Play #Luxury #Water

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
-- Clive James

#Reading #Writing #Interesting

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.
-- Clive James

#Beautiful #Sun #Classic

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.
-- Clive James

#Vegas #People #Documentaries

Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
-- Clive James

#Sex #Thinking #Men

The repeat run of Fawlty Towers drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of The Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.
-- Clive James

#Running #People #Television

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.
-- Clive James

#Nhs #Worry #Classic

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
-- Clive James

#Kitchen #Amy #Classic

I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
-- Clive James

#Fate #Egomaniacs #Cosmos

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
-- Clive James

#Art #Interesting #Firsts

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.
-- Clive James

#Eye #Two #Miracle

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.
-- Clive James

#Believe #Mind #Fundamentals

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
-- Clive James

#Art #Expression #Long

Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
-- Clive James

#Dancing #Nails #Giants

Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.
-- Clive James

#Looks #Unions #Able

Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.
-- Clive James

#Grateful #Style #Enemy

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.
-- Clive James

#Book #Doe #Want

In the twelfth century the Basque fishermen of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with the consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view it is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did.
-- Clive James

#Pride #America #Views

Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away.
-- Clive James

#Country #Character #Mean

The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
-- Clive James

#Teaching #Keys #Remember

On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
-- Clive James

#Girl #Wonderful #Incitement

I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
-- Clive James

#Wish #Hollywood #Pearls

A decade ago, critics suggested biotech crops would not be valuable in the developing world. Now 90 percent of farmers who benefit are resource-poor farmers in developing countries. These helped alleviate 7.7 million subsistence farmers in China, India, South Africa, the Philippines from abject poverty.
-- Clive James

#Country #India #Benefits

Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
-- Clive James

#Mother #Humorous #Men

In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.
-- Clive James

#Sweet #Kings #Humorous

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.
-- Clive James

#Humorous #Reality #Cities

In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
-- Clive James

#Humorous #Beer #Mcdonalds

In London there was no home cooking worthy of the name. When you were in funds you ate out. But only the people whose faces appeared in such publications as Town and Queen could afford to eat in restaurants serving food which would leave them looking and feeling better instead of worse.
-- Clive James

#Queens #Humorous #Home

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.
-- Clive James

#Girl #Humorous #Australia

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.
-- Clive James

#Humorous #Order #Tangled

Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.
-- Clive James

#Humorous #People #Smoking

You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.
-- Clive James

#Women #Down And #Solo

There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.
-- Clive James

#Position

The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB
-- Clive James

#Kgb #Secret #British

In the Bob Hope Golf Classic, the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service.
-- Clive James

#Mistake #Golf #Men

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.
-- Clive James

#Narrative #Diaries #Philosopher

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
-- Clive James

#Effort #Television #Demand

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there
-- Clive James

#Dirty #Cities #Names

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
-- Clive James

#Player #Wimbledon #Way

Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.
-- Clive James

#Artist #Want #Facts

Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
-- Clive James

#Men #Fire #Sound

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
-- Clive James

#Hindsight #Inevitable #Belittle

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.
-- Clive James

#Light #Phrases #Turns

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.
-- Clive James

#Intellectual #Corruption #Tendencies

Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive.
-- Clive James

#Worry #Alive #World

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
-- Clive James

#Essence #Class #Justice

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
-- Clive James

#College #Technology #America

When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.
-- Clive James

#Drinking #Artist #Simple

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
-- Clive James

#Wisdom #Thinking #Doe

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
-- Clive James

#Change #People #Television

Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.
-- Clive James

#Sports #Rude #Balls

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.
-- Clive James

#Effort #Done #Honest

The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.
-- Clive James

#Soup #Stones #Classic

John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
-- Clive James

#Tennis #Looks #Building

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.
-- Clive James

#Mean #Tennis #Bread

A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.
-- Clive James

#Horse #Enough #Stage

They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.
-- Clive James

#Funny #Dog #Psychopath

Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.
-- Clive James

#Men #Car #Trying

Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.
-- Clive James

#Water #Ponds #Verbs

As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce.
-- Clive James

#Opinion #Talent #Natural

Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.
-- Clive James

#Unions #Classic #States

A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't
-- Clive James

#Thinking #Dallas #Classic

His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
-- Clive James

#Funeral #Black #Body

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.
-- Clive James

#Sports #Men #Thinking

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
-- Clive James

#Hair #Tennis #Broccoli

"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.
-- Clive James

#Voice #America #Giving

Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
-- Clive James

#Tennis #Dull #Borg

Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.
-- Clive James

#Curves #Tennis #Energy

Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.
-- Clive James

#Princess #Tennis #Looks

Roscoe Tanner seems to have found a way of making his service go even faster, so that the ball is now quite invisible, like Stealth, the American supersonic bomber which nobody has ever seen.
-- Clive James

#Tennis #Bombers #Balls

An education without a Bible education is no education.
-- Clive James

#Classic

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.
-- Clive James

#America #Looks #World

In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate.
-- Clive James

#Queens #America #World

Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
-- Clive James

#Crazy #Want #Film

The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.
-- Clive James

#Butterfly #Fighting #Keys

If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
-- Clive James

#Memories #Civilization #Age

How much atonement is enough? The bombing must be allowed as at least part-payment: those of our young people who are concerned about the moral problem posed by the Allied air offensive should at least consider the moral problem that would have been posed if the German civilian population had not suffered at all.
-- Clive James

#War #Air #People

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts....
-- Clive James

#Looks #Schwarzenegger #Condom

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
-- Clive James

#Mahler #Never Trust #Should