Quotes from Clive James

Mankind in the Christian era possesses one huge advantage over the ancients: a bad conscience. —EGON FRIEDELL,

Hitler wouldn't have needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

I'm not off the hook, but the hook is holding me upright; and it doesn't even hurt, which makes me a lot luckier than some of the people I see at the hospital.

I have found the title of the book as impossible to forget as the poems in it were impossible to remember.

We made our first private-life contact not at Harmondsworth or in the Kombibus but at the London Library in St James's Square.

The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.

Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.