Clive James Quotes - Page 2

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.

I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.

A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog.

Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.

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

They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.

Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.

Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?

If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.

She wasn't just beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny.

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

In the twelfth century the Basque fishermen of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with the consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view it is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did.

Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.

In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.

The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.

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.

I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about.

Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.