Clive James Quotes

A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

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 judgment and should be trusted with nothing.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

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

Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.

Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

An education without a Bible education is no education.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.

If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.

When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.

I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.

The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB

I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.