Clive James
Clive James
Clive James AO CBEis an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism. He has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1962...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionMemoirist
Date of Birth7 October 1939
CountryAustralia
book writing age
Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.
dog art writing
What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
california missing smoking
I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.
country food people
The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.
thinking media waiting-around
I think the great trick of doing my sort of thing is to learn to use your downtime, and of course in the media and especially in television, there's a heck of a lot of time of waiting around. And I think the trick is to use that.
poetry trying literature
One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
humorous reality cities
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.
funny mother humorous
Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her (mother's) guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
country benefits world
A decade ago, critics suggested biotech crops would not be valuable in the developing world. Now 90 percent of farmers who benefit are resource-poor farmers in developing countries. These helped alleviate 7.7 million subsistence farmers in China, India, South Africa, the Philippines from abject poverty.
wish pearls saws
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!
girl wonderful incitement
On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.
teaching keys remember
The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
country character mean
Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away.
towers want
Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.