Top 140 Clive James Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

105. “Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from ‘Star Wars’ played backwards through a washing machine.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

108. “Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can’t decipher the cyrillic alphabet.”

— Clive James

109. “I think the great trick of doing my sort of thing is to learn to use your downtime, and of course in the media and especially in television, there’s a heck of a lot of time of waiting around. And I think the trick is to use that.”

— Clive James

110. “As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, ‘Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.’ I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can’t be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

112. “A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.”

— Clive James

113. “Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.”

— Clive James

114. “We are often told that the next generation of literati won’t have private libraries: everything will be in the computer. It’s a rational solution, but that’s probably what’s wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.”

— Clive James

115. “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.”

— Clive James

116. “Pound had argued – and Eliot had helped him prove – that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.”

— Clive James

117. “Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn’t deliver pizza.”

— Clive James

118. “To die guessing that you will be forgotten is one thing. But what would it be like to know that you have been forgotten before you die?”

— Clive James

119. “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.”

— Clive James

120. “Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.”

— Clive James

121. “Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.”

— Clive James

122. “You can’t be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.”

— Clive James

123. “Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves.”

— Clive James

124. “That amazing thing doesn’t need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.”

— Clive James

125. “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.”

— Clive James

126. “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

127. “Orpheus, with immaculately cut pleated trousers instead of a toga, was played by Jean Marais, Cocteau’s young lover. The leading actress, Maria Casares, was Albert Camus’s mistress.”

— Clive James

128. “Man and Superman: “the audience gets an exhausting idea of the inexhaustibility of the subject, and is bored brilliantly.”

— Clive James

129. “I’ve only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.”

— Clive James

130. “Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.”

— Clive James

131. “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.”

— Clive James

132. “The inevitable effect of a biographer’s hindsight is to belittle the subject’s foresight.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

134. “In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald’s, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.”

— Clive James

135. “The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power.”

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

137. “And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew.”

— Clive James

138. “He can do phrases that pull you in like an Inuit fisherman whose hook is suddenly taken by a killer whale...”

— Clive James

139. “What do you mean, speak louder? If I could speak louder, I wouldn’t need a telephone.”

— Clive James

140. “Men ought to treat with caution those that clarify the deed by seeing deep into the thought that lies behind it.”

— Clive James

141. “Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world.”

— Clive James