Clive James Quotes

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

Snooker is just chess with balls.

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

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

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

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

A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

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

They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

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

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

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.

When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.

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

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.

I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.

On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.

Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

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.

The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.

Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.

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.

I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.

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.

The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.

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

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.

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.

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

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.

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

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

I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

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.

She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.

I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!

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.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

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