Clive James Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same things, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Clive James
Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.

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

Clive James
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
On Marilyn Monroe

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

Clive James
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.

Clive James
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
The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized.

Clive James
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
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
The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.

Clive James
Like a Goth swaggering around Rome wearing an onyx toilet seat for a collar, he exudes self-confidence.
Of Rupert Murdoch

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

Clive James
On Arnold Schwarzenegger:
I once described him as looking like a brown condom full of walnuts.

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

Clive James
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.

Clive James
To goad the BBC is a rewarding sport in itself. It makes a tabloid feel like a heavyweight.

Clive James
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.

Clive James
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
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.

Clive James
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.

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

Clive James
In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.

Clive James
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