Clive James Quotes

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.

I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.

You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

An education without a Bible education is no education.

Mocking Hugh Hefner is easy to do, and in my mind should be made easier.

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.

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.

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.

You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.

It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.

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.

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

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.

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

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.

I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

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.

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.

I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.

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

Bjorn Borg looks like a hunchbacked, jut-bottomed version of Lizabeth Scott, impersonating a bearded Apache princess.

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

A sense of humour is common sense dancing.

Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.

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

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

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

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

Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.

Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

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.

Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

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.

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.

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.

If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.

Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides.

The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.

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