Clive James Quotes

Snooker is just chess with balls.

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

A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't

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

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

Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.

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

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

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.

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

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

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.

Stop worrying -- nobody gets out of this world alive.

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.

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

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.

On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful.

When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.

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

Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

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

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.

I won't have to miss smoking any more.

Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.

A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem?

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.

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

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.

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

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.

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.

Murray 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.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.

Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting.

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.

I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.

In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate.

In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.