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“It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.”
-- Clive James
#Witty #Powerful #Science
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“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
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“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.”
-- Clive James
#Wisdom #Fiction #Dull
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“She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.”
-- Clive James
#Confusion #Way #Abstract
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“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
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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.”
-- Clive James
#Memorable #Poetry #Sound
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“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
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“Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.”
-- Clive James
#Triumph #Habit
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“As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks”
-- Clive James
#Wisdom #Art #Australia
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.”
-- Clive James
#Stupid #Men #Personality
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“A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.”
-- Clive James
#Play #Luxury #Water
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?”
-- Clive James
#Sex #Thinking #Men
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“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
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“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
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“Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.”
-- Clive James
#Kitchen #Amy #Classic
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“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
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“First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.”
-- Clive James
#Art #Interesting #Firsts
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.”
-- Clive James
#Dancing #Nails #Giants
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“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
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“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
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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.”
-- Clive James
#Book #Doe #Want
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