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
classic
An education without a Bible education is no education.
unions classic blokes
Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.
kitchen amy classic
Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
beautiful sun classic
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.
nhs worry classic
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.
soup stones classic
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.
thinking dallas classic
A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't
worry world alive
Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive.
art new-york believe
The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy.
memories civilization age
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.
war air people
How much atonement is enough? The bombing must be allowed as at least part-payment: those of our young people who are concerned about the moral problem posed by the Allied air offensive should at least consider the moral problem that would have been posed if the German civilian population had not suffered at all.
butterfly fighting keys
The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.
mahler never-trust should
You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
art writing performing
Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.