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
unions classic blokes
Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.
looks unions able
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.
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.
crazy want film
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.
stupid men personality
Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.
play luxury water
A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
women down-and solo
You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.
art expression long
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.