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Clive James

150 quotes

“Probably it is only in free countries, however, that a humorous regard for corruption is possible. In the totalitarian countries, corrupt from top to bottom, nobody is laughing because nothing is laughable. There is no difference between what things are and what things ought to be, since what things ought to be no longer exists even as a standard.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[In Marcel Ophuls' film The Memory of Justice] Mad old Nazis were to be heard deploring modern decadence. 'The difference is, we weren't obsessed with smut,' said one comfortable, retired SS man, all unaware of being up to his neck in blood and pus.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But you will never catch Sir Oswald [Mosley] admitting to anti-Semitism. All he does is embody it. He talked of 'the use of Jewish money power to promote a world war.' Taxed on this point, he disclaimed anti-Semitism, by saying that he meant 'not all Jews, but some Jews.' That's as far as he will ever reduce his estimate. The truth, of course, is that the real number of Jews responsible for World War II was zero.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On Miss World (BBC 1) Patrick Lichfield and Sacha Distel helped herd the beef. Even further down-market, The Royal Variety Performance (BBC 1) was hosted by Max Bygraves, who tried the time-honoured gimmick of singing the finale at the start. 'And if you doan like our finish / You doan have to stay for the show.' Thanks. Click.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can remember being young enough, long ago, to believe that in Tennessee Williams the giant themes of Greek tragedy had returned, all hung about with Magnolias. Ignorance of Greek tragedy helped in this view.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody caught one another's eye with a 'Spot the loon' look when [Tony] Benn was talking. The show was probably true to life, since each minister had a vested interest in briefing the journalist chosen to play him. It's a sweet technique for getting at the truth, so I imagine someone will put a stop to it soon enough.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most solid documentary of the week was White Rhodesia (BBC1), presented by Hugh Burnett. He was on screen only two or three times and even when he was there you would have sworn he wasn't.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perry [Como] gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say 'Cheese' and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Italian Marxist composer Luigi Nono (BBC2) proclaims the necessity for contemporary music to 'intervene' in something called 'the sonic reality of our time.' Apparently it should do this by being as tuneless as possible.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Disco dancing is really dancing for people who hate dancing, since the beat is so monotonous that only the champions can find interesting ways of reacting to it. There is no syncopation, just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Mrs Thatcher] started quoting St Francis within minutes of becoming elected, and scarcely an hour had gone by before she was sounding like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the many services performed by Professor Smith's book is to show that Nuremberg was not a kangaroo court. Even the Russian and the French judges were able to act with some independence from their governments. It is true that some of the defendants were arbitrarily chosen, true that the indictment was questionably framed, and true again that some of the verdicts were anomalous. But by and large justice was done. The idea that at Nuremberg the victors tried the vanquished is a false one. The vanquished were the millions of guiltless men, women, and children already obliterated.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. There is no author's name on the title page, merely a modest line of italic type advising us that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's 'short biography' has been composed 'by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee.' This is the one statement in the entire opus which is undeniably true. Only an Institute could write like this.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing Like the Sun and the Enderby books prove that Burgess is as clever as he seems. His utopian satires, of which 1985 is yet another, mainly just seem clever. At a generous estimate there are half a dozen ideas in each of them.”
Clive James (1939–2019) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'Anthony Burgess in 1978'
“First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After half a lifetime of poking fun at Bernard Shaw's materialism Kingsmill was not above touching the despised sage for ten quid. Even in the Australian school of literary morals, we weren't allowed to slag a man and put the bit on him simultaneously: it had to be one or the other.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Joseph Brodsky, writing about Mandelstam, called lyricism the ethics of language. Larkin's wit is the ethics of his poetry. It brings his distress under our control. It makes his personal unhappiness our universal exultation. Armed with his wit, he faces the worst on our behalf, and brings it to order.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks...”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People don't get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mrs. Krantz, having dined at Mark's Club, insists that it is exclusive. There would not have been much point to her dining there if she did not think that. A bigger snob than she might point out that the best reason for not dining at Mark’s Club is the chance of finding Mrs Krantz there. It takes only common sense, though, to tell you that on those terms exclusiveness in not just chimerical but plain tedious. You would keep better company eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a launderette.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shaw said that three years as a theatre critic was the maximum before insanity set in - the implication being that anyone who lasted longer than that was too dull to be unbalanced by his nightly ordeal.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Give or take the odd anatomical discrepancy, John Berger affects me exactly like Jane Fonda - ie. any opinion of mine which I discover he shares I immediately examine to find out what's wrong with it.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) 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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The running gag of the Grand Prix series is that whereas Murray [Walker], safe in the commentary box, 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 (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me [Sydney Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing opera houses.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Australian TV is so bad it is almost impossible to describe. If you have seen American television and can imagine it without its redeeming features, then Australian TV is even worse than that.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Ocker is strictly a mass media event — but then Australia is pre-eminently a mass society. Ockerism's most famous incarnation is Paul Hogan, a stand-up comic who rivals even Dennis Lillee as an advertiser's idea of irresistible consumer-bait.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the twelfth century the Basque fisherman of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. (This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did).”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Speer got quite a lot done in Berlin and if hostilities had not started early he would have transformed it utterly, with consequences far more hideous than anything achieved by the RAF.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]hat's really the first thing to say about Speer's architecture. It was just awful. A genius without talent, he was essentially a theatrical personality, with enough gumption to be quiet about it.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Humphries writes in propria persona his prose can scarcely contain its freight of cultivated allusions. He writes the most nutritiously rococo English in Australia today, but nobody will be able to inherit it. To know him would not be enough. You would have to know what he knows.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Pushkin - who was in the position of having to think what form a national culture might take - called for a dispassionate criticism, he wasn't calling for help in writing poems, which he could do all by himself. He was merely stated his wish to write them in a civilized atmosphere, whose absence was reducing him to isolation, and thereby damaging his individuality.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dead ground is the territory you can’t judge the extent of until you approach it: seen from a distance, it is unseen. Almost uniquely amongst imagined countries, Tolstoy’s psychological landscape is without dead ground — the entire vista of human experience is lit up with an equal, shadowless intensity, so that separateness and clarity continue even to the horizon.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Schnabel said that Ludwig van Beethoven|Beethoven's late piano sonatas are music better than could be played. Larkin's best poems are poetry better than can be said, but sayability they sumptuously offer. Larkin demands to be read aloud. His big, intricately formed stanzas, often bridging from one to the next, defeat the single breath but always invite it. As you read, the ideal human voice speaks in your head. It isn't his: as his gramophone records prove, he sounded like someone who expects to be interrupted. It isn't yours, either. It's ours.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“McAuley's nominal subject was left-wing incomprehension of the recently published Dr. Zhivago, but the real object of his ire seemed to be liberalism in general, starting with the invention of moveable type, or perhaps the wheel.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our post-Hannah Arendt imaginations are haunted by the wrong figure: for every owl-eyed, mild-mannered pen-pusher clinically shuffling the euphemistic paperwork of oblivion, there were a hundred noisily dedicated louts revelling in the bloodbath. The gas chambers, our most enduring symbol of the catastrophe, were in fact anomalous: most of those annihilated did not die suddenly and surprised as the result of a deception, but only after protracted humiliations and torments to whose devising their persecutors devoted inexhaustible creative zeal.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t makes no sense whatsoever to call the perpetrators of the Holocaust 'the Germans' if by that is meant that the German victims of Naziism – including many Jews who went on regarding themselves as Germans to the end of the line – somehow weren’t Germans at all. That’s what the Nazis thought, and to echo their harebrained typology is to concede them their victory.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Germany, everyone knew that helping or hiding Jews was an unpardonable crime, which would be punished as severely as an attack on Hitler’s life – because it was an attack on Hitler’s life. Why, Goldhagen asks, did the population not rise up? The answer is obvious: because you had to be a hero to do so.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Claus Graf von Stauffenberg's famous last words Es lebe das geheime Deutschland have turned out to be not quite so romantically foolish as they sounded at the time. If there never was a secret Germany, the July plotters at least provided a sacred moment, and the Germans of today are right to cherish it.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Holocaust would have been unimaginable without the Nazi Party; the Nazi Party would have been unimaginable without Hitler; and Hitler’s rise to power would have been unimaginable without the unique circumstances that brought the Weimar Republic to ruin. To hear Goldhagen tell it, mass murder was all set to go: a century-long build-up of eliminationist anti-Semitism simply had to express itself. But the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power.”
Clive James (1939–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source