Quotes from Clive James

A LL THE ENTRIES in Freud's diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long.

Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: "It's about to make me a lot of money.

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL

The only battlefield where victory Is measured by the victim's ecstasy, And one soft cry is worth a city burning.

matched pair of Purdey shot-guns, one of which had not been fired,

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it.

If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don't go in. Even when working with a whole heart, you are bound to have the occasional failure, and sometimes the whole heart will be the reason: caring too much can make you try too hard, and what should have sung will merely simper. But to work with half a heart means failure every time, and the results will scream the place down.

It is a sad farewell. You loved it all. You dream that you might keep it in your head But memories, where can you take them to? Take one last look at them. They end with you.

have been at a great feast of languages," says Moth, "and stolen the scraps.")

We shouldn't call a critic a murderer just because it is his duty to sign death certificates. —MARCEL REICH-RANICKI, DIE ANWALTE DER LITERATUR,

Peacock in real life undid Shelley's vegetarianism by waving a steak under his nose when he fainted,

How well he's read, to reason against reading!

The sound of the sea you hear in Proust, as if the whole book were a shell held to your ear, is the sound of the amniotic fluid, reminding you, across all your barriers of self-protection, that the first thing you ever heard was voices in the water.

Schopenhauer extended the same idea by favouring real observation over erudition, and stated confidently that the second sapped the first.

He has always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how they would have done it.

Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything. —EGON FRIEDELL,

In 1942 he was saying—saying without crying, and God alone knows how—that the Jews would have to be withdrawn from Europe after the war and go to their new home.

It might be said that the United States is the first known case of a civilization developing through disintegration.

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) was the man who defined the Communist world as the first society in history condemned to live behind walls in order to stop people getting out.

When filming in Rome, I had a jacket made by the celebrated tailor Littrico, and found out that I had the same measurements as Gorbachev: they were on file in Littrico's office.)

When the cover was lifted to reveal nothing but a heaped plate of pineapple chunks, however, there were people in the audience who could take no more.

thumbnail sketch of his life would include two main facts:

As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that.

and he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue).