Quotes from Clive James

Funny Debates at both Cambridge and Oxford eventually helped to convince me that the only place to be amusing is in a serious context.

In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

To die guessing that you will be forgotten is one thing. But what would it be like to know that you have been forgotten before you die?

bohemian's ability not to worry about money always starts with your money rather than his.)

Men ought to treat with caution those that clarify the deed by seeing deep into the thought that lies behind it.

And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days. —DRIEU LA ROCHELLE,

There are no genres, there are only talents. —JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, LE VOLEUR DANS LA MAISON VIDE, P. 311

Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. —COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.):

In those days you matched a block of balsa against a rudimentary diagram and got going with a razor blade, which sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa. If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognizable as a thumb, you were a genius.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivation. Deprived I never felt.

Man and Superman: "the audience gets an exhausting idea of the inexhaustibility of the subject, and is bored brilliantly.

Aron's conclusion was an epigram: "Peace impossible, war unlikely.

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks

Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.

That amazing thing doesn't need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.

the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity's imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state. —RAYMOND ARON, L'OPIUM

Communist interpretation is never wrong. Logicians will object in vain that a theory which exempts itself from all refutations escapes from the order of truth. —RAYMOND ARON, L'OPIUM

Orpheus, with immaculately cut pleated trousers instead of a toga, was played by Jean Marais, Cocteau's young lover. The leading actress, Maria Casares, was Albert Camus's mistress.

The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power.

I had to leave Paris the next morning. As always I would wonder why and start counting the days before I could go back. And then lose count and be lost again in the life that, by some strange twist of fate, I lived somewhere else. Au revoir Paris. Bonjour tristesse.

history is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.

What do you mean, speak louder? If I could speak louder, I wouldn't need a telephone.

One parent is enough to spoil you but discipline takes two. I got too much of what I wanted and not enough of what I needed.

He can do phrases that pull you in like an Inuit fisherman whose hook is suddenly taken by a killer whale...