Clive James: Trending quotes

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Clive James: 302 quotes6 likes

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

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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“…that's really the first thing to say about Speer's architecture. It was just awful. A genius without talent, he was essentially a theatrical personality, with enough gumption to be quiet about it.”

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, Snakecharmers in Texas (1988)

“There is abundant evidence in Stoppard’s plays to show that he is as capable of emotion as anybody. In Enter A Free Man Linda is a finely tuned moral invention whose equivalents we might well miss in the later plays, if we really thought they should be there. The mainspring of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the perception—surely a compassionate one—that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something which ought to have mattered to Shakespeare.”

'Tom Stoppard: Count Zero Splits the Infinite'
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

“Give or take the odd anatomical discrepancy, John Berger affects me exactly like Jane Fonda - ie. any opinion of mine which I discover he shares I immediately examine to find out what's wrong with it.”

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

“As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks…”

'A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

“My idea of a fine wine was one that merely stained your teeth without stripping the enamel.”

Memoirs, Falling Towards England (1985)

“The mad idea that the Jews have no right to exist is a potent intensifier of the almost equally mad idea that the State of Israel can somehow be eliminated. I say 'almost' because a friend of mine in Australia recently presented me with a plausible case that the Middle East would probably be a more peaceful area if the State of Israel had never been founded. Like her argument that the Aborigines would have been a lot happier if the Europeans had never shown up, this contention was hard to rebut, except by rudely pointing out that we were both sitting in an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, history having happened.”

'The University of the Holocaust: On Anti-Semitism Now' (Sunday Times, March 28, 2004)
Essays and reviews

“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.”

On Peter Sellers, p. 127-9
Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006)

“Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”

On Barbara Cartland
'Wedding of the century'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

“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.”

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

“All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.”

<span title="New York Public Library card required, which can be requested online at http://nypl.org">"Postcard from L.A.,"</span> http://i.ezproxy.nypl.org/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/476511393/ The Observer, (10 June 1979) http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/476511393.html <br class="br">Essays and reviews

“It's yet another mark of Auden's superiority that whereas his contemporaries could be didactic about what they had merely thought or read, Auden could be tentative about what he felt in his bones.”

'On Auden's Death'
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)