Quotes from Clive James

Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.

Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.

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.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

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

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

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

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

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

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

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.

Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren't in search of the truth, they're in search of themselves.

Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides.

Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.

Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.

When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

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