Top 140 Clive James Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I won’t have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I’m going: It’s like a row of restaurants in California.”

— Clive James

52. “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

53. “I actually didn’t like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it’s fun to talk about. That’s one of the real dangers of drugs: they’re too much fun to talk about.”

— Clive James

54. “As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks.”

— Clive James

55. “A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn’t.”

— Clive James

56. “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

57. “Socrates, after all, said that the unexamined life was not worth living. He might have added, however, that continual self-examination would leave us no time to live.”

— Clive James

58. “Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

60. “Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.”

— Clive James

61. “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.”

— Clive James

62. “Stefan George: “He looks like an old woman who looks like an old man.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

64. “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.”

— Clive James

65. “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.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

67. “The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

69. “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.”

— Clive James

70. “John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.”

— Clive James

71. “In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate.”

— Clive James

72. “In the Bob Hope Golf Classic, the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service.”

— Clive James

73. “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.”

— Clive James

74. “Murray sounds like a blindfolded man riding a unicycle on the rim of the pit of doom, the men actually facing the danger are all so taciturn that you might as well try interviewing the cars themselves.”

— Clive James

75. “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.”

— Clive James

76. “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

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

— Clive James

78. “It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

80. “In those days you matched a block of balsa against a rudimentary diagram and got going with a razor blade, which sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa. If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognizable as a thumb, you were a genius.”

— Clive James

81. “Dinner was meat – not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain – which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

83. “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.”

— Clive James

84. “The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.”

— Clive James

85. “Men never sound more stupid than when they’re telling you they’re a very complex personality.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

87. “Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it’s in Hamburger Technology.”

— Clive James

88. “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.”

— Clive James

89. “I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn’t go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

93. “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.”

— Clive James

94. “In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.”

— Clive James

95. “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.”

— Clive James

96. “All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.”

— Clive James

97. “In London there was no home cooking worthy of the name. When you were in funds you ate out. But only the people whose faces appeared in such publications as Town and Queen could afford to eat in restaurants serving food which would leave them looking and feeling better instead of worse.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

99. “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.”

— Clive James

100. “Young men especially – I don’t know if young women feel much the same – but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.”

— Clive James