Clive James Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
What proper man would plump for bints
Ahead of After-Eight thin mints?
True pleasure for a man of parts
Is tarts in him, not him in tarts.

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

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
When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.

Clive James
"Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers.

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

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
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
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.

Clive James
It 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.
Of the Sydney Opera House

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

Clive James
The last stage of fitting the product to the market is fitting the market to the product.

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

Clive James
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
As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

Clive James
There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.

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

Clive James