"I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting."
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Quote collection
Clive James quotes (page 5 of 7)
138 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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""Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers."
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"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."
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"Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting."
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"You can't be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart."
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"The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand."
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"I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer."
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"First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art."
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"Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones."
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"Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza."
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"Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film."
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