Quotes from Clive James

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.

Men never sound more stupid than when they're telling you they're a very complex personality.

If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.

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.

I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.

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.

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.

Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

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.

Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.