Clive James Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Clive James's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Clive James's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 138 quotes on this page collected since October 7, 1939! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

  • 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.

    "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Art Beat, www.pbs.org. December 3, 2013.
  • First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

    Clive James (2015). “From the Land of Shadows”, p.77, Pan Macmillan
  • 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 (2017). “Glued To The Box”, p.127, Pan Macmillan
  • Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.

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

    Clive James (2012). “Always Unreliable: Memoirs”, p.162, Pan Macmillan
  • It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.

    "'I'm dying, I just look remarkably cheerful' says Clive James". Interview with Philip Williams, www.abc.net.au. August 19, 2015.
  • 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.

    "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Art Beat, www.pbs.org. December 3, 2013.
  • 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.

  • 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 (2014). “Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014”, p.130, Pan Macmillan
  • 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.

    "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Art Beat, www.pbs.org. December 3, 2013.
  • 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.

    Funny  
    Clive James (1991). “Falling Towards England: (Unreliable Memoirs Continued)”, Isis Large Print Books
  • 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.

    "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". "PM" with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. December 21, 2015.
  • 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.

    Clive James (2012). “Always Unreliable: Memoirs”, p.111, Pan Macmillan
  • 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.

    "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Ellen Rolfes, www.pbs.org. December 3, 2013.
  • You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

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

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

    Clive James (2015). “The Crystal Bucket”, p.103, Pan Macmillan
  • 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.

    Italian  
    "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". "PM" with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. January 4, 2016.
  • 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.

    Funny   Humorous  
    Clive James (2013). “The Complete Unreliable Memoirs”, p.256, Pan Macmillan
  • They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.

    Funny  
  • 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.

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

  • 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.

    "Summer Series: Clive James, in the face of death". Interview with Mark Colvin, www.abc.net.au. January 4, 2016.
  • 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 (2013). “The Complete Unreliable Memoirs”, p.294, Pan Macmillan
  • 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.

  • 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

    Clive James (1985). “Flying Visits”
  • 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.

    "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Art Beat, www.pbs.org. December 3, 2013.
  • Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

    "Clive James on turning his ‘last time on earth’ into a writing wellspring". Interview with Ellen Rolfes, December 3, 2013.
  • 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 (2013). “Snakecharmers In Texas”, p.28, Pan Macmillan
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 138 quotes from the Author Clive James, starting from October 7, 1939! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!