Clive James: Likeness

Clive James was Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Clive James: 302   quotes 6   likes

“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.

Home , Night

“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

“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

Imagination , Time , Housing

“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

“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

“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

Secret , Teachers , Chance , Time

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”

Clive James

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

“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.”

Clive James

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

Peace , History , Idea , Madness

“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.”

Clive James

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

Fate , World , History

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

Clive James

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

“Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.”

Clive James

'On American Movie Critics' (New York Times Book Review, June 4, 2006)
Essays and reviews

Way

“For those who would like to throw off the burden of history and move on, Goldhagen’s book has been a welcome gift. Purporting to bring the past home to the unsuspecting present, he has had the opposite effect. If he has not yet asked himself why his book has received such an enthusiastic reception in Germany, he might ponder why ‘the Germans’ should be so glad to be supplied with the argument that their parents and grandparents were all equally to blame because they inhabited a culture blameworthy in itself: we’re different now. But nobody is that different now, because nobody was that different then.”

Clive James

Postscript to Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Books , Home , History , Parent

“Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers - he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of the masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals.”

Clive James

'Bitter Seeds: Solzhenitsyn
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

Pain , Imagination , Thinking