Quotes from Clive James

The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes. —MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

To put it briefly, the secret is to put it briefly. But you always think that's what you're doing, until experience teaches you that you aren't being brief enough.

But they are quite often ignoring the truth while they say so.

To save Germany was not granted to them; only to die for it; luck was not with them, it was with Hitler. But they did not die in vain. Just as we need air if we are to breathe, and light if we are to see, so we need noble people if we are to live. —RICARDA HUCH,

I had landed in the lap of the only kind of luxury I have ever cared about – a wealth of opportunity.

But the time has already arrived when such a joke does not register as funny. What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel excluded?

It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women.

The middle of the sentence had already left the beginning of the sentence lost in the distance, and the end of the sentence was slower to arrive than a school holiday.

But peace is not a principle: merely a desirable state of affairs.

the American-affiliated students were incomparably better informed than the locals—incomparably more intelligent all round, to put it bluntly—but the one thing the Americans could not do to save their lives was recite the verse in front of them.

The only answer to Hitler was a contrary violence.

The Germans have a word for it: Todgeschweigen. Killed by not being mentioned.

Chesterton once said, on the subject of innate human dignity, that it all depended on the presence of the holy spirit, and that it was otherwise hard to take the human body seriously, belonging as it did to a creature that nourished itself by pushing food into a hole at the bottom of its face.

I still get so impatient with the whole time-consuming business of covering up exposed skin that I will buy the first thing that catches my eye, and that when it comes to shoes the first thing that catches your eye is the last thing you should ever put on your feet.

Noël Coward's comment about the secret of success being the capacity to survive failure.

He knew where to drop the needle – an especially important qualification in the matter of Wagner, with whom it is an invariable rule that the most immediately accessible bits are never at the edge of the disc.

Dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight. —SIR THOMAS BROWNE,

Some people are different from the rest of us, and so are the rest of us.

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.

even today, when I have a cold, it is the worst cold in the history of the house.

Any critic who complains about the monotony of what he is being paid to look at is really complaining about the condition of his own soul.

Asking you to play someone you're not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata.

Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that there was no correctness this side of originality.

How short life must be, if something so fragile can last a lifetime. —KAFKA