Clive James Quotes (151 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Cultural Amnesia

Clive James

Clive James: 151 quotes 6 likes

Famous Clive James Quotes

“Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.”

Clive James

Closing lines, p. 174
Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980)
Context: As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the City of London. Down there in the street I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other. In Sydney Harbour, twelve thousand miles away and ten hours from now, the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires. It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back. All in, the whippy's taken. Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.

“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

“Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.”

Clive James

Opening lines to the preface, p. 9
Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980)

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

Clive James

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

Clive James

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

Clive James

Clive James Quotes about people

“The new Germany is a democracy. So was the old Germany, or it tried to be: but then the Nazis got on, and Hell broke loose. It can break loose anywhere: all people have hellish propensities.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

“Everything the British Empire built here will be history. Most of it already is, but it’s a history that has left its mark. In the War Cemetery at Sai Wan Bay you can see it clearly: understated but indelible. The armed forces of Imperial Japan tried to enslave the whole of the East, including Japan itself. Caught up in the terrible war that raged in Asia and the Pacific, a lot of our people who came out here to fight never came home. They died in a good cause. But if the people in this graveyard were somehow to learn that yet another tyranny was on the way, they would find it hard to rest in peace. One of them is my father, who has lain here now for fifty years. He lived and died under our old empire without ever thinking that it was wonderful beyond question. But he thought that it created more than it destroyed, and he was right. The best hope of our last colony is that when the men from the mainland finally take over they will not try to rewrite history by pretending we were never here. Some of us will always be here.”

Clive James

On the then imminent transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the British Empire to the People's Republic of China. From Clive James' Postcard from Hong Kong.
Television and radio

“Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn't like the masses: he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts.”

Clive James

'Jorge Luis Borges', p. 69
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“Strong language in Larkin is put in not to shock the reader but to define the narrator's personality. When Larkin's narrator in 'A Study of Reading Habits' (in The Whitsun Weddings) said 'Books are a load of crap' there were critics - some of them, incredibly, among his more appreciative - who allowed themselves to believe that Larkin was expressing his own opinion. (Kingsley Amis had the same kind of trouble, perhaps from the same kind of people, when he let Jim Dixon cast aspersions on Mozart.) It should be obvious at long last, however, that the diction describes the speaker.”

Clive James

'Philip Larkin: 'Wolves of Memory'
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

“Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information that he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i. e. they were tortured just for the hell of it.”

Clive James

'Terry Gilliam', p. 279
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“When the bell rang to start the Italian hunting season, devotees of la caccia drove at full speed into the woods and shot everything that moved. Since the animals were sensibly lying low, most of the victims were people. Advancing at random through woods, the hunters - whose minds, like their expensive guns, were on a hair trigger - fired when they thought they saw something. Often they had seen each other. They also killed civilians in nearby villages. The occasional animal got hit, but only by a fluke. One man blasted a rabbit that was already hanging from another man's belt. So much vehicular traffic on the woodland roads, however, ensured that a considerable amount of wildlife was run over.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 144

Clive James Quotes about time

“Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 165

“The whole secret of raising a fart in class is to make it sound as if it is punctuating, or commenting upon, what the teacher is saying. Timing, not ripeness, is all. 'And since x tends to y as c tends to d,' Fred expounded, 'then the differential of the increment of x squared must be… must be… come on, come on! What must it flaming be?' Here was the chance to to give my version of what it must be. I armed one, opened the bomb bay, and let it go. Unfortunately, the results far exceeded the discreet limits I had intended. It sounded like a moose coughing.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 105-6

“Hughes spends a lot of time in this book saying what his country never had, and still hasn't got. Actually it's got it, because it's got Hughes. He should give his country a little more credit, if only because it still gives so much credit to him.”

Clive James

Review of Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes (New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007)
Essays and reviews

“The most solid documentary of the week was White Rhodesia (BBC1), presented by Hugh Burnett. He was on screen only two or three times and even when he was there you would have sworn he wasn't.”

Clive James

'A load of chunk'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

“Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.”

Clive James

From the preface, p. 9
Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980)

“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. There was a time when I got hot under the collar if the critics said I had nothing new to say. Now I realise that they had a point. My field is the self-evident. Everything I say is obvious, although I like to think that some of the obvious things I have said were not so obvious until I said them.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 241

Clive James: Trending quotes

“In the Warsaw ghetto, the power of music, the will to live and the courage to stand against evil added up to very little, and The Pianist has the wherewithal to respect that sad fact and make sense of it. In the Warsaw ghetto, what counted was luck, and the luck had to be very good.”

Clive James

On Polanski's The Pianist
Essays and reviews, The Meaning of Recognition (2005)
Context: Roman Polanski's new film The Pianist is a work of genius on every level, except, alas, for the press-pack promotional slogan attributed to the director himself. "The Pianist is a testimony to the power of music, the will to live, and the courage to stand against evil." If he actually said it, he flew in the face of his own masterpiece, which is a testimony to none of those things. In the Warsaw ghetto, the power of music, the will to live and the courage to stand against evil added up to very little, and The Pianist has the wherewithal to respect that sad fact and make sense of it. In the Warsaw ghetto, what counted was luck, and the luck had to be very good.

Sadness , Music , Courage , Sense

“Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure.”

Clive James

Pedro Henríquez Ureña, p. 777
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Context: There is a consoling mythology, constantly being added to, which would have us believe that genius operates beyond donkey work. Thus we are told reassuringly that Einstein was no better at arithmetic than we are; that Mozart gaily broke the rules of composition while jotting down a stream of black dots without even looking; and that Shakespeare didn't care about grammar. Superficially, there are facts to lend substance to these illusions. But illusions they remain. There is always some autistic child in India who can speak in prime numbers, but that doesn't mean Einstein couldn't add up; Mozart would not have been able to break the rules in an interesting way unless he was able to keep them if required; and Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure.

“Beyond a certain point - and that point is reached early - precision is what expressiveness depends on.”

Clive James

'The Continuing Insult to the English Language' (The Monthly, May 2006)
Essays and reviews
Context: ... by now some of the editors and subeditors [on Fleet Street] are themselves products of the anti-educational orthodoxy by which expressiveness counts above precision. It would, if the two terms were separable. But they aren't. Beyond a certain point - and that point is reached early - precision is what expressiveness depends on.

Dependency

Clive James Quotes

“After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.”

Clive James

Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)
Context: The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair. The full facts about the Soviet Union were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao's China left that compounded despair looking like an inadequate response. After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.

“His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known.”

Clive James

On Peter Porter, 'Talking for Posterity' (Times Literary Supplement, May 14, 2010)
Essays and reviews
Context: [H]e could never have played the hero, because for him it was creativity itself that had the heroic status, beyond politics, beyond patriotism, beyond even personal happiness. It’s the reason why his work is like that. His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known.

Flying

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

Clive James

Way

“Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL”

Clive James book Cultural Amnesia

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Solitude

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

Clive James

'Introduction'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

World , Thinking

“In Australia during WWII, a couple of established poets invented the supposedly nonsensical works of a fictitious poet called Ern Malley and used them to discredit the modernist pretensions of the young editor who printed them. It never occurred to them that as writers of talent they were not in a position to suppose that they could deliberately write something perfectly meaningless.”

Clive James

'Congratulations!', on scams, frauds and hoaxes.
Television and radio, Radio 4: A Point of View

“The running gag of the Grand Prix series is that whereas Murray [Walker], safe in the commentary box, 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

'Hot pistils'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Men , Cars , Box

“From 'The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered'
Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error -
Nothing to do with merit.”

Clive James

Poems and song lyrics

Books , Error

“Speer got quite a lot done in Berlin and if hostilities had not started early he would have transformed it utterly, with consequences far more hideous than anything achieved by the RAF.”

Clive James

'Albert Speer: Ruins Without Value'
Essays and reviews, Snakecharmers in Texas (1988)

Hostility

“He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness… He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.”

Clive James

'Vale, Peter Cook' ( The Pembroke College, Cambridge, Society Annuel Gazette http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/odds+ends/petercook.html, September 1995)
Essays and reviews

Art , Idea

“The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it.”

Clive James

'Two Essays on Theodore Roethke'
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Question

“I can remember being young enough, long ago, to believe that in Tennessee Williams the giant themes of Greek tragedy had returned, all hung about with Magnolias. Ignorance of Greek tragedy helped in this view.”

Clive James

'Over the tarp'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

Help

“From "Beware of the Beautiful Stranger". title song of 1970 album, sung by Pete Atkin.”

Clive James

Poems and song lyrics

Beauty

“The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao's executioners went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.”

Clive James

'Mao Zedong', p. 457
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

School , Flowers

“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

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Country

“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. There is no author's name on the title page, merely a modest line of italic type advising us that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's 'short biography' has been composed 'by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee.' This is the one statement in the entire opus which is undeniably true. Only an Institute could write like this.”

Clive James

'Brezhnev: A State of Boredom'
Opening lines of his review of the Brezhnev: A Short Biography
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Books , Dogs , Bird , Sleep

“Shaw said that three years as a theatre critic was the maximum before insanity set in - the implication being that anyone who lasted longer than that was too dull to be unbalanced by his nightly ordeal.”

Clive James

'Introduction'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

“I was officially advised that during the long vacation it might be profitable to attain at least a nodding acquaintance with the curriculum, and thus stave off the already likely possibility that I would receive a degree classified so low it would be tantamount to a certificate of mental disability.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 45

“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

Ernesto Sábato
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Love , Dance

“In the twelfth century the Basque fisherman of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. (This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did).”

Clive James

'Postcard from Biarritz'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

“Every week I watch Stuart Hall on It's A Knock-Out and realise with renewed despair that the most foolish thing I ever did was to turn in my double-0 licence and hand back that Walther PPK with the short silencer.”

Clive James

'Eddie Waring Communicates'
Essays and reviews, Visions Before Midnight (1977)

Silence , Despair

“After half a lifetime of poking fun at Bernard Shaw's materialism Kingsmill was not above touching the despised sage for ten quid. Even in the Australian school of literary morals, we weren't allowed to slag a man and put the bit on him simultaneously: it had to be one or the other.”

Clive James

'Richard Ingrams at Doubting Castle'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

School

“It just never occurred to me that the real distance I would have to cross would be in my own mind. In that respect, I had flown half a million miles before I moved an inch, and these three volumes are just the rattling the side of my cot made when I climbed over, on the first stage of that long, momentous journey across the carpet, towards the light of the open door.”

Clive James

closing lines, p. 249
Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990)

Light

“Probably it is only in free countries, however, that a humorous regard for corruption is possible. In the totalitarian countries, corrupt from top to bottom, nobody is laughing because nothing is laughable. There is no difference between what things are and what things ought to be, since what things ought to be no longer exists even as a standard.”

Clive James

'The Weld This Week'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

Country

“I think the control I had over my work was less than adequate. There was nothing wrong with the good bits in my poems, it’s just that they were packed around with lots and lots of bad bits, and I think that the only way I’ve improved in the last several decades [... ] is that I’ve learned to leave out the bad bits. I’m not sure you do improve beyond that.”

Clive James

From a conversation with Peter Porter broadcast on ABC Radio, Australia in the program 'Book Talk' on Saturday 15 October 2005
Television and radio

Way , Thinking , Learning

“It often happens that we are most touched by what we are least capable of. Evanescent delicacy is not the quality in the arts that I admire most, but it is often the characteristic by which I am most reduced to envy.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 64

Art , Envy

“Spielberg had done his best with Schindler's List, but his best left some of us wondering just how useful a contribution it was, to make a movie about how some of the Jews had survived, when the real story was about all the Jews who hadn't.”

Clive James

'Glamourising terror', on The Baader-Meinhof Complex.
Television and radio, Radio 4: A Point of View

“In Germany, everyone knew that helping or hiding Jews was an unpardonable crime, which would be punished as severely as an attack on Hitler’s life – because it was an attack on Hitler’s life. Why, Goldhagen asks, did the population not rise up? The answer is obvious: because you had to be a hero to do so.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Life , Help

“When Pushkin - who was in the position of having to think what form a national culture might take - called for a dispassionate criticism, he wasn't calling for help in writing poems, which he could do all by himself. He was merely stated his wish to write them in a civilized atmosphere, whose absence was reducing him to isolation, and thereby damaging his individuality.”

Clive James

'A Death in Life'
Essays and reviews, Snakecharmers in Texas (1988)

Thinking , Help

“The Holocaust would have been unimaginable without the Nazi Party; the Nazi Party would have been unimaginable without Hitler; and Hitler’s rise to power would have been unimaginable without the unique circumstances that brought the Weimar Republic to ruin. To hear Goldhagen tell it, mass murder was all set to go: a century-long build-up of eliminationist anti-Semitism simply had to express itself. But the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

History , Past

“Himmler was certainly banal, but he was also baroque, steaming around in a special train and diverting large amounts of the Third Reich's increasingly thin resources to such 'tasks' as proving scholastically that the Japanese were Aryans. How could you show all that and be believed? The whole Nazi reality was a caricature. The more precisely you evoke it, the less probable it looks.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews

Reality , Training

“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

'Jean-Paul Sartre', p. 671
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Communication

“Attempting to define the sensationalism of the press, Malcolm Muggeridge came up with the slogan 'Give us this day our daily story.' A doomed effort, because all it did was remind the reader that the King James Version of the Lord's Prayer was better written than an article by Muggeridge.”

Clive James

'Georg Christoph Lichtenberg', p. 383
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Effort

“[Mrs Thatcher] started quoting St Francis within minutes of becoming elected, and scarcely an hour had gone by before she was sounding like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.”

Clive James

'Zorba the Hun'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

Books , Age , Quotes , Reading

“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

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 19

“For the educated man, there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

Education

“From 'What Happened to Auden'
His later manner leaves your neck-hair flat,
Not standing up as Housman said it should
When poetry has been achieved. For that,
In old age Auden simply grew too good.”

Clive James

Poems and song lyrics

Age

“…it makes no sense whatsoever to call the perpetrators of the Holocaust ‘the Germans’ if by that is meant that the German victims of Naziism – including many Jews who went on regarding themselves as Germans to the end of the line – somehow weren’t Germans at all. That’s what the Nazis thought, and to echo their harebrained typology is to concede them their victory.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Sense , Victory

“The question isn't about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart.”

Clive James

'Alfred Einstein', p. 184
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Question

“[In Marcel Ophuls' film The Memory of Justice] Mad old Nazis were to be heard deploring modern decadence. 'The difference is, we weren't obsessed with smut,' said one comfortable, retired SS man, all unaware of being up to his neck in blood and pus.”

Clive James

'The Weld This Week'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

Justice , Memory , Madness

“Martin, rather than step into the spotlight, would prefer to die in an unarmed attack on the power station supplying its electric current. His genuine modesty is the main reason for the fateful discrepancy between him and the journalistic literary sexton beetles who make copy out of him: they would like to receive the degree of attention that he would like to avoid, and the clearer it becomes that he would like to avoid it, the more they resent him for failing to appreciate their generosity.”

Clive James

On Martin Amis, p. 205
Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006)

Fate

“If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.”

Clive James

'Borgias on my mind'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

Books , Reading

“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

'Introduction'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

World , Art , Appearance

“The controls fell easily to hand, and from there onto the floor.”

Clive James

On the Trabant. From Clive James' Postcard from Berlin.
Television and radio

“To me [Sydney Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing opera houses.”

Clive James

'Postcard from Sydney'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

Time , Housing

“The Italian Marxist composer Luigi Nono (BBC2) proclaims the necessity for contemporary music to 'intervene' in something called 'the sonic reality of our time.' Apparently it should do this by being as tuneless as possible.”

Clive James

'Wuthering depths'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

Music , Reality , Time

“One of the many services performed by Professor Smith's book is to show that Nuremberg was not a kangaroo court. Even the Russian and the French judges were able to act with some independence from their governments. It is true that some of the defendants were arbitrarily chosen, true that the indictment was questionably framed, and true again that some of the verdicts were anomalous. But by and large justice was done. The idea that at Nuremberg the victors tried the vanquished is a false one.”

Clive James

'Only Human: On Nuremberg'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Books , Justice , Idea , Question

“Joseph Brodsky, writing about Mandelstam, called lyricism the ethics of language. Larkin's wit is the ethics of his poetry. It brings his distress under our control. It makes his personal unhappiness our universal exultation. Armed with his wit, he faces the worst on our behalf, and brings it to order.”

Clive James

'On Larkin's Wit'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Universe , Personality

“After thirteen hours we arrived at Bangkok airport and I raced for the smoking room. Smoking room was a big name for a small Perspex cubicle that was opaque from the outside because of the grey pressure of the fumes within. I opened the door, saw all the other smokers sitting there face to face in two tight rows, and I realised that I would have to smoke in the standing position. Then I realised I didn’t have to light up. All I had to do was breathe in. It was the moment of truth.”

Clive James

'Smoking the Memory', on giving up smoking
Television and radio, Radio 4: A Point of View

Truth , Light

“Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them.”

Clive James

'Jorge Luis Borges', p. 65
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Books , Music , Reading

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