Clive James Quotes

85 quotes in 1356 categories

• 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.
• A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.
• Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
• All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.
• 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…
• Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
• Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.
• Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
• All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.
• The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.
• The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB
• In the Bob Hope Golf Classic, the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at…
• Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.
• 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…
• Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything -…
• A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
• As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she…
• 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…
• Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
• The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone…

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