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Clive James
150 quotes
“Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My mother had naturally spiced the pudding with sixpences and threepenny bits, called zacs and trays respectively. Grandpa had collected one of these in the oesophagus. He gave a protracted, strangled gurgle which for a long time we all took to be the beginning of some anecdote.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember the shock of seeing Ray undressed. He looked as if he had a squirrel hanging there. I had an acorn.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Children in Australia are still named after movies and sporting events. You can tell roughly the year the swimming star Shane Gould was born. It was about the time Shane was released. There was a famous case of a returned serviceman who named his son after all the campaigns he had been through in the Western Desert. The kid was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh Tobruk El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Herzen was closer to the truth when he said that every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow. Everything is a Madeleine.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It often happens that we are most touched by what we are least capable of. Evanescent delicacy is not the quality in the arts that I admire most, but it is often the characteristic by which I am most reduced to envy.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Riding the crest, I diversified, exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will... By mastering this skill I set myself on a par with those court jesters of old who could wow the monarch and all his retinue with a simultaneous leap, whistle and fart. Unable to extend my neo-Homeric story-telling activities from the playground to the classroom, I could nevertheless continue to hog the limelight by interpolating a gaseous running commentary while the teacher addressed himself to the blackboard.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whole secret of raising a fart in class is to make it sound as if it is punctuating, or commenting upon, what the teacher is saying. Timing, not ripeness, is all. 'And since x tends to y as c tends to d,' Fred expounded, 'then the differential of the increment of x squared must be... must be... come on, come on! What must it flaming be?' Here was the chance to to give my version of what it must be. I armed one, opened the bomb bay, and let it go. Unfortunately, the results far exceeded the discreet limits I had intended. It sounded like a moose coughing.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My idea of a fine wine was one that merely stained your teeth without stripping the enamel.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After that, I was on the right track to the city centre, where there was enough light to distinguish people from letter boxes. The letter boxes, in my perhaps embittered view, had warmer personalities than the people.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was officially advised that during the long vacation it might be profitable to attain at least a nodding acquaintance with the curriculum, and thus stave off the already likely possibility that I would receive a degree classified so low it would be tantamount to a certificate of mental disability.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film. It is just one of the things that crazy people want to do, like starting a law suit or sending long, unsolicited letters to people in the public eye. A letter from a nutter has a recognisable format and orthography, as if all letter-writing nutters have to go through some kind of Top Gun nutter-letter-writing academy.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The professor was a bore on a Guggenheim, a long-range drone, and international ballistic fossil. I spent the whole hour drawing little pictures of hanged men.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the surface of the water, a midge vanishes into a hungry ripple. I'm not ready yet. He wonders why, at his age and having come so far, he still feels that. The culmination of his luck is that he will never feel any other way.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. There was a time when I got hot under the collar if the critics said I had nothing new to say. Now I realise that they had a point. My field is the self-evident. Everything I say is obvious, although I like to think that some of the obvious things I have said were not so obvious until I said them.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It just never occurred to me that the real distance I would have to cross would be in my own mind. In that respect, I had flown half a million miles before I moved an inch, and these three volumes are just the rattling the side of my cot made when I climbed over, on the first stage of that long, momentous journey across the carpet, towards the light of the open door.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can't tolerate having strong men around him.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had a conspicuous individual talent, but it was interpretive, not directly creative. He could never have emulated Chaplin, Keaton or Jacques Tati and set up a whole project by himself, controlling its every detail even if the task took years. But there is no point carping. He had such a protean capacity that it would have been a miracle if he had been in full command of it.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don't go in.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never got away from the enigma of Coren's personality. For me he remains the most enigmatic man of his generation, because the sprawling palace of his attainments has so many rooms he has scarcely bothered to look into. He can fly planes, drive fast cars, dance accomplished jive, speak perfect German. But who is he? His writing never tells you, because its humour is a shield.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the assembled company rags you for a failing, you can usually play up to it for comic effect: it's the failing they don't mention that you have to watch out for.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Martin, rather than step into the spotlight, would prefer to die in an unarmed attack on the power station supplying its electric current. His genuine modesty is the main reason for the fateful discrepancy between him and the journalistic literary sexton beetles who make copy out of him: they would like to receive the degree of attention that he would like to avoid, and the clearer it becomes that he would like to avoid it, the more they resent him for failing to appreciate their generosity.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“John Carey, who had once buried The Metropolitan Critic, hailed Unreliable Memoirs as the written equivalent of sliced bread. Instantly I revised my opinion of his critical prowess upwards.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he sure sign of a shlock media product is that it is drawn not from life but from previous media products.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Himmler was certainly banal, but he was also baroque, steaming around in a special train and diverting large amounts of the Third Reich's increasingly thin resources to such 'tasks' as proving scholastically that the Japanese were Aryans. How could you show all that and be believed? The whole Nazi reality was a caricature. The more precisely you evoke it, the less probable it looks.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Santayana was probably wrong when he said that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. Those who remember are condemned to relive it too.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Holocaust miniseries The Observer (10 September 1978)
“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 (1939–2019) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Postcard from L.A.," The Observer, (10 June 1979)
“Referring to "the historian David Irving" is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Malcolm and the Masses", London Review of Books, 3:2 (5 February 1981).
“He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness... He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vale, Peter Cook" The Pembroke College, Cambridge, Society Annuel Gazette (September 1995)
“I quite like talking myself, but when Peter was in the room there wasn't much point, you just had to listen. He was unimaginably, overwhelmingly gifted. You had to imagine a cross between Dr. Johnson, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Sellers and don't forget Charlie Chaplin — because Peter was a great mime too. … He was inexhaustible. It was like talking to Europe, talking to history.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Peter Ustinov BBC News (29 March 2004)
“Only the misapprehension that [Paglia] can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in Inside Deep Throat, to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was 'an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality.' On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can't even be convincing when they masturbate.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Camille Paglia The New York Times Book Review (27 March 2005)
“[B]y now some of the editors and subeditors [on Fleet Street] are themselves products of the anti-educational orthodoxy by which expressiveness counts above precision. It would, if the two terms were separable. But they aren't. Beyond a certain point - and that point is reached early - precision is what expressiveness depends on.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Continuing Insult to the English Language" The Monthly (May 2006)
“Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: American Movie Critics: How to Write About Film", New York Times Book Review (4 June 2006)
“Hughes spends a lot of time in this book saying what his country never had, and still hasn't got. Actually it's got it, because it's got Hughes. He should give his country a little more credit, if only because it still gives so much credit to him.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Golden Boy", The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007)
“[H]e could never have played the hero, because for him it was creativity itself that had the heroic status, beyond politics, beyond patriotism, beyond even personal happiness. It’s the reason why his work is like that. His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Peter Porter, 'Talking for Posterity' The Times Literary Supplement (14 May 2010)
“Every week I watch Stuart Hall on It's A Knock-Out and realise with renewed despair that the most foolish thing I ever did was to turn in my double-0 licence and hand back that Walther PPK with the short silencer.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's yet another mark of Auden's superiority that whereas his contemporaries could be didactic about what they had merely thought or read, Auden could be tentative about what he felt in his bones.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the educated man, there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is abundant evidence in Stoppard’s plays to show that he is as capable of emotion as anybody. In Enter A Free Man Linda is a finely tuned moral invention whose equivalents we might well miss in the later plays, if we really thought they should be there. The mainspring of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the perception—surely a compassionate one—that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something which ought to have mattered to Shakespeare.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers - he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of the masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a piece written circa 1960 called 'The Twelve Caesars' he said that world events were the work of individuals and that the motives of those individuals were often frivolous, even casual. There is something of Suetonius and Plutarch in Vidal's unblushing readiness to view contemporary history in terms of character.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Strong language in Larkin is put in not to shock the reader but to define the narrator's personality. When Larkin's narrator in 'A Study of Reading Habits' (in The Whitsun Weddings) said 'Books are a load of crap' there were critics - some of them, incredibly, among his more appreciative - who allowed themselves to believe that Larkin was expressing his own opinion. (Kingsley Amis had the same kind of trouble, perhaps from the same kind of people, when he let Jim Dixon cast aspersions on Mozart.) It should be obvious at long last, however, that the diction describes the speaker.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Larkin] himself is well aware that there are happier ways of viewing life. It's just that he is incapable of sharing them, except for fleeting moments - and the fleeting moments do not accumulate, whereas the times in between them do.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source