Clive James: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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)

Memory , Time , Housing

“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

“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)

Hate , People , Idea

“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

“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

Thinking , Light , Time

“[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