Clive James Quotes

The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes. - MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

If you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line.

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

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.

What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Today, they separately demonstrate what a luxury it is to be a stable, prosperous, democratic nation with a dependable constitution.

The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished

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.

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.

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.

As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, 'Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.' I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can't be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized.

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

a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: "retrospective clairvoyance.

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn't have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows. - GOLO MANN, GESCHICHTE UND GESCHICHTEN, P. 170

a poem is never finished, only abandoned,

Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.

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

It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.

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

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

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

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.

A sense of humour is common sense dancing.

Her novels, which I have not yet read, are usually described as the work of a writer's writer, or perhaps of someone who has been to the Institute for the Theory of Literature in Zagreb.

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.

My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.

I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about.

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.

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

Why should I waste my imagination on myself? - SERGEI DIAGHILEV

Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I,

And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew.

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.

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

Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right.

Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

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.

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

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.

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.

(Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.)

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.

Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. - WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)

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.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

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.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.

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

Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.

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.

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.

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

Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.

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

Australia is all that and more, and Argentina, after yet another implosion of the civil order, is once again none of it and less.

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.

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.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts ...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.

And he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue).

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.

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

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

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. - ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL

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.

The secret for an artist is to make that a subject and not bang your head against the wall and give up. But to turn it into and treat the new subject matter, which is one's own vanishing.

Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

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.

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.

Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It's got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side. I've had everything hurled at me, especially in Australia. Australia is where the tough journalists are.

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

Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive.

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.

As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that.

Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren't in search of the truth, they're in search of themselves.

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.

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.

Snooker is just chess with balls.

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

Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.

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.

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.

thumbnail sketch of his life would include two main facts:

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.

Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.

He saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse.

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

I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.

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

A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem?

Until the end of World War II, Argentina and Australia were running in parallel.

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.