Top 140 Clive James Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Snooker is just chess with balls.”

— Clive James

2. “Whoever called snooker “chess with balls” was rude, but right.”

— Clive James

3. “Stop worrying – nobody gets out of this world alive.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

6. “A sense of humour is common sense dancing.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

9. “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.”

— Clive James

10. “Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.”

— Clive James

11. “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

12. “You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they’re forty.”

— Clive James

13. “The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.”

— Clive James

14. “An education without a Bible education is no education.”

— Clive James

15. “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.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

17. “The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that’s why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

21. “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.”

— Clive James

22. “It’s a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don’t think I’m interested in any discussion about whether I’m a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.”

— Clive James

23. “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.”

— Clive James

24. “If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.”

— Clive James

25. “One parent is enough to spoil you but discipline takes two. I got too much of what I wanted and not enough of what I needed.”

— Clive James

26. “Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts...”

— Clive James

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

30. “The Canadian version of Julius Caesar’s memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.”

— Clive James

31. “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

32. “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.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

34. “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

35. “Aron’s conclusion was an epigram: “Peace impossible, war unlikely.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

37. “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

39. “It’s my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

42. “All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.”

— Clive James

43. “My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.”

— Clive James

44. “I had to leave Paris the next morning. As always I would wonder why and start counting the days before I could go back. And then lose count and be lost again in the life that, by some strange twist of fate, I lived somewhere else. Au revoir Paris. Bonjour tristesse.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

47. “There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.”

— Clive James

48. “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.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James