Clive James Quotes
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Clive James, AO, CBE, FRSL is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism.

James has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1962. He is famously a bon vivant, noted for his warm, insightful humour and wry outlook.

✵ 7. October 1939 – 24. November 2019

Clive James: 151 quotes6 likes

Clive James Quotes

“Perry [Como] gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say 'Cheese' and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow.”

'Olde Rubbishe'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

“The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can't tolerate having strong men around him.”

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 126

“But you will never catch Sir Oswald [Mosley] admitting to anti-Semitism. All he does is embody it. He talked of 'the use of Jewish money power to promote a world war.' Taxed on this point, he disclaimed anti-Semitism, by saying that he meant 'not all Jews, but some Jews.' That's as far as he will ever reduce his estimate. The truth, of course, is that the real number of Jews responsible for World War II was zero.”

'The Truly Strong Man'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

“Children in Australia are still named after movies and sporting events. You can tell roughly the year the swimming star Shane Gould was born. It was about the time Shane was released. There was a famous case of a returned serviceman who named his son after all the campaigns he had been through in the Western Desert. The kid was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh Tobruk El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris.”

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 29

“The professor was a bore on a Guggenheim, a long-range drone, and international ballistic fossil. I spent the whole hour drawing little pictures of hanged men.”

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 120

“If you can't have a revolution without Jacobinism, then it becomes a matter of how to have reform without revolution. Anyone who "accepts the necessity of Jacobinism" wants to try his hand at it. When François Furet hinted at this conclusion in his truly revolutionary book on the French Revolution, he found himself immediately tagged by the left as a diehard spokesman of the reactionary right. It was assumed that if he was against the Terror, he was against the people. His contention that the Terror had been against the people was not accepted.”

'Edgar Quinet', p. 587
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“Herzen was closer to the truth when he said that every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow. Everything is a Madeleine.”

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 56

“Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished French speakers can catch Proust's tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught.”

'Marcel Proust', p. 579
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“In The Bob Hope Golf Classic (LWT) the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service.”

'Blinding white flash'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

“[Larkin] himself is well aware that there are happier ways of viewing life. It's just that he is incapable of sharing them, except for fleeting moments - and the fleeting moments do not accumulate, whereas the times in between them do.”

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

“I should say in haste that his early poetry gave him the right to think of himself as a giant. But he was also a nutter, one of the manic-depressive type who, when in a downhill phase, accuse themselves loudly of being Hitler. (They never accuse themselves of being the seventh anonymous stormtrooper from the right at a dedication ceremony for the new blood banner in a provincial town twenty miles from Dortmund: they always accuse themselves of being Hitler, just as the people who had previous lives in ancient Egypt always turn out to have been pharaohs or chief priests, and never night-shift workers on the crew that put up the third tallest obelisk in one of the satellite temples at Karnak).”

On Robert Lowell, p. 181
Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006)

“Disco dancing is really dancing for people who hate dancing, since the beat is so monotonous that only the champions can find interesting ways of reacting to it. There is no syncopation, just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.”

'The flying feet of Frankie Foo'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

“Claus Graf von Stauffenberg’s famous last words Es lebe das geheime Deutschland have turned out to be not quite so romantically foolish as they sounded at the time. If there never was a secret Germany, the July plotters at least provided a sacred moment, and the Germans of today are right to cherish it.”

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

“Our post-Hannah Arendt imaginations are haunted by the wrong figure: for every owl-eyed, mild-mannered pen-pusher clinically shuffling the euphemistic paperwork of oblivion, there were a hundred noisily dedicated louts revelling in the bloodbath. The gas chambers, our most enduring symbol of the catastrophe, were in fact anomalous: most of those annihilated did not die suddenly and surprised as the result of a deception, but only after protracted humiliations and torments to whose devising their persecutors devoted inexhaustible creative zeal.”

'Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator', a review of Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

“My mother had naturally spiced the pudding with sixpences and threepenny bits, called zacs and trays respectively. Grandpa had collected one of these in the oesophagus. He gave a protracted, strangled gurgle which for a long time we all took to be the beginning of some anecdote.”

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 13

“After that, I was on the right track to the city centre, where there was enough light to distinguish people from letter boxes. The letter boxes, in my perhaps embittered view, had warmer personalities than the people.”

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 15

“I see the pain on your face when you say the word intellectual, because it has so many syllables in it.”

From an interview with Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central's "Colbert Report"
Television and radio

“As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce…As a natural silent comedian Marilyn might possibly have qualified, with the proviso that she was not to be depended on to invent anything. But as a natural comedian in sound she had the conclusive disadvantage of not being able to speak. She was limited ineluctably to characters who rented language but could not possess it, and all her best roles fell into that category. She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.”

'Mailer's Marilyn
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

“Mrs. Krantz, having dined at Mark's Club, insists that it is exclusive. There would not have been much point to her dining there if she did not think that. A bigger snob than she might point out that the best reason for not dining at Mark’s Club is the chance of finding Mrs Krantz there. It takes only common sense, though, to tell you that on those terms exclusiveness in not just chimerical but plain tedious. You would keep better company eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a launderette.”

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

“On Miss World (BBC 1) Patrick Lichfield and Sacha Distel helped herd the beef. Even further down-market, The Royal Variety Performance (BBC 1) was hosted by Max Bygraves, who tried the time-honoured gimmick of singing the finale at the start. 'And if you doan like our finish / You doan have to stay for the show.”

Thanks. Click.
'The Truly Strong Man'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

“Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film. It is just one of the things that crazy people want to do, like starting a law suit or sending long, unsolicited letters to people in the public eye. A letter from a nutter has a recognisable format and orthography, as if all letter-writing nutters have to go through some kind of Top Gun nutter-letter-writing academy.”

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 93

“Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.”

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

“Santayana was probably wrong when he said that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. Those who remember are condemned to relive it too.”

Ibid.
Essays and reviews

“Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own.”

'Raymond Aron' p. 35
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

“He had a conspicuous individual talent, but it was interpretive, not directly creative. He could never have emulated Chaplin, Keaton or Jacques Tati and set up a whole project by himself, controlling its every detail even if the task took years. But there is no point carping. He had such a protean capacity that it would have been a miracle if he had been in full command of it.”

Ibid.
Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006)

“From the same song”

Poems and song lyrics

“From 'We Being Ghosts'
Well, good to see you. Sorry I have to fly.
I'm struggling with a deadline, God knows why,
And ghosts keep interrupting. Think of me
The way I do of you. Quite often. Constantly.”

Poems and song lyrics

“Introduction' p. XVIII”

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

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

“Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.”

Essays and reviews, Clive James On Television (1991)