120 Quotes by Clive James

Snooker is just chess with balls.

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

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

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

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

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

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

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

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

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

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

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

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

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

When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

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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.

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.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

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

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.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

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

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

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

The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.

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.

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

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.

I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

An education without a Bible education is no education.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

A sense of humour is common sense dancing.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

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.

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.

It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.

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.

The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.

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.

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.

You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.

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

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.

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.

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.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

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.

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.

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.

In The Bob Hope Golf Classic (LWT) 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.

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.

I think the great trick of doing my sort of thing is to learn to use your downtime, and of course in the media and especially in television, there's a heck of a lot of time of waiting around. And I think the trick is to use that.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

In the movies first impressions are everything. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right.

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.