Clive James Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clive James
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.

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
A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.

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
Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

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

Clive James
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
If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.

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

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
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
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