Clive James: Trending quotes

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Clive James: 302 quotes6 likes

“I quite like talking myself, but when Peter was in the room there wasn't much point, you just had to listen. He was unimaginably, overwhelmingly gifted. You had to imagine a cross between Dr. Johnson, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Sellers and don't forget Charlie Chaplin — because Peter was a great mime too. … He was inexhaustible. It was like talking to Europe, talking to history.”

Clive James

On Peter Ustinov (BBC News, March 29, 2004)
Essays and reviews

“From "Payday Evening" (sung by Pete Atkin on The Road of Silk 1974)
Outside the junkie tries to sell his girl
Her face has just begun to come apart
Look hard and you can see the edges curl
Speed has got her beaten at the start”

Clive James

Poems and song lyrics

“From 'Anniversary Serenade'
The ring is closed. The rolling dice we cast
So long ago still roll, but not so fast.
The colours fade that we nailed to the mast.
We lose the future but we own the past.
We own the past?
From our first kiss, a lifetime to the last.”

Clive James

Poems and song lyrics

“Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they find out he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio.”

Clive James

'Georg Christoph Lichtenberg', p. 395
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“From 'Windows Is Shutting Down'
:Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
:On their last leg. So what am we to do?
:A letter of complaint go just so far,
:Proving the only one in step are you.

:Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
:A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
:Before they gets to where you doesn't knows
:The meaning what it must have meant to had.”

Clive James

Poems and song lyrics

“Taste was his world. Rilke behaved as if art were taste elevated to the highest possible degree. The armigerous chatelaines who played hostess were happy to believe it, since the idea made them artists too.”

Clive James

Sergei Diaghilev, p. 172
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“[T]he sure sign of a shlock media product is that it is drawn not from life but from previous media products.”

Clive James

'Holocaust' (The Observer, September 10, 1978)
Essays and reviews

“I remember the shock of seeing Ray undressed. He looked as if he had a squirrel hanging there. I had an acorn.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 17

“When Humphries writes in propria persona his prose can scarcely contain its freight of cultivated allusions. He writes the most nutritiously rococo English in Australia today, but nobody will be able to inherit it. To know him would not be enough. You would have to know what he knows.”

Clive James

'Approximately in the Vicinity of Barry Humphries'
Essays and reviews, Snakecharmers in Texas (1988)

“One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was.”

Clive James

'Thomas Mann', p. 453
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“On the surface of the water, a midge vanishes into a hungry ripple. I'm not ready yet. He wonders why, at his age and having come so far, he still feels that. The culmination of his luck is that he will never feel any other way.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 240

“Unreliable Memoirs was just too hard to classify: most of the first wave of American reviewers had convicted it of trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time. Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I read these indictments with sad bewilderment. The most powerful reviewer, in The New York Review of Books, had seized on my incidental remark 'Rilke was a prick' in order to instruct me that Rilke was, on the contrary, an important German poet.”

Clive James

Dick Cavett, p. 97
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“Speer never made the mistake of saying there were no extermination camps. He said he didn't know about them. He impressed the gullible by declaring himself willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes even though he was not aware of their full scope. But as the man better informed about the Reich's industrial resources than anybody else including Hitler, Speer was in fact fully aware of the purpose and the extent of the Final Solution and by pretending he was not he did the opposite of accepting responsibility.”

Clive James

'Speer Checks Out'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

“The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.”

Clive James

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 18

“[E]ven if you do know about art, you can’t talk about it socially… Damien Hirst’s shark was a common talking point for a time, and so will the diamond skull be: for a little more time, perhaps, but not forever. The Botticelli paintings are forever because they aren’t talking points.”

Clive James

'Reflections on a Diamond Skull', on corporate art
Television and radio, Radio 4: A Point of View

“After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism.”

Clive James

'Leon Trotsky', p. 747
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.”

Clive James

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

“First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.”

Clive James

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

“Riding the crest, I diversified, exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will… By mastering this skill I set myself on a par with those court jesters of old who could wow the monarch and all his retinue with a simultaneous leap, whistle and fart. Unable to extend my neo-Homeric story-telling activities from the playground to the classroom, I could nevertheless continue to hog the limelight by interpolating a gaseous running commentary while the teacher addressed himself to the blackboard.”

Clive James

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

“I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me.”

Clive James

Opening lines of the autobiography, p. 11
Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980)