Clive James Quotations | Page 2

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there

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

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

The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.

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.

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

One of the virtues of the NHS... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it.

My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.

The repeat run of Fawlty Towers drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of The Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.

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 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 first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.

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

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.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.

John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.

John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.

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

I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.

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.

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

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.

Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts....

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

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.

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