Quotes from Clive James

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.

Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It's got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side. I've had everything hurled at me, especially in Australia. Australia is where the tough journalists are.

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

Finally you get to the age when a book's power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.

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

Nowadays you have to go pretty far south in Italy before you encounter the widespread belief that any foreign girl is a whore unless her father and two brothers drive her around in an armoured car.

The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can't be coherent without being intolerant.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

Devotees who say that À la recherche du temps perdu reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?

And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew.

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

We are often told that the next generation of literati won't have private libraries: everything will be in the computer. It's a rational solution, but that's probably what's wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.

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.

It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one's leisure hours improving one's aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.

Books are the anchors Left by the ships that rot away.

Why should I waste my imagination on myself? —SERGEI DIAGHILEV

As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, 'Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.' I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can't be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out

Socrates, after all, said that the unexamined life was not worth living. He might have added, however, that continual self-examination would leave us no time to live.

if you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line.

a poem is never finished, only abandoned,

A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

I should have been more careful To remember everything I could go on, except I can't

Stefan George: "He looks like an old woman who looks like an old man.