"Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right."
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Quote collection
Clive James quotes (page 1 of 7)
138 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Snooker is just chess with balls."
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"The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB"
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"A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't"
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"It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are."
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"A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all."
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"Fiction is life with the dull bits left out."
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"Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail."
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"They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available."
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"She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short."
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"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"
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"Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me."
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"Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff."
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"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."
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"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."
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"When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog."
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"As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks"
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"Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits."
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"Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence."
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"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."
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