Quotes from Clive James

Until then, most of my poems had been devotedly incomprehensible. Now they were becoming comprehensible, a transformation that would have allowed me to detect their sentimentality if they had not been so true to my feelings, which were sentimental.

Auschwitz, where she wound up in a block for young girls.

No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn't exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone. —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, IN AN 1861

Mercifully, in evoking her girls' dormitory, she restricts herself to one scene.

The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished

Any of the kneeling girls who fell over was taken away to be gassed,

This was a strong point if you thought that Annan's disapproval of poverty and racism was ever likely to diminish either of those things.

Many attempt without success to make up for their lack of talent with defects of character.

Isn't a blank verse paragraph just a chunk of prose bent around corners after every five beats? Try doing that and you'll not only get lines that don't scan, you'll also get, and all too often, the one effect that you definitely don't want: successive lines that rhyme.

They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no-one understands you. —CHARLES CHAPLIN TO ALBERT EINSTEIN AT THE 1931 PREMIERE OF CITY LIGHTS

In the morning, the recaptured escapee had her arms and legs broken in front of their eyes.

The poverty of his son has diminished, apparently, but we are assured that Annan had no direct responsibility for that.)

the failed states in Latin America needed double-entry bookkeeping more than they needed any ideology,

To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil. With the Nazis this won't be easy. They know exactly what they're doing: they just can't imagine it.

It is the destiny of the emigrant that the foreign land does not become his homeland: his homeland becomes foreign.

When everything has left you, you are alone. When you have left everything, you are lonely.

ample opportunity to realize that those who have made compromises under an occupation in order to survive are reluctant to meet anyone tactless enough to return from oblivion.

George Russell had responded to yet another request for a reference, sending, by return air-letter, an encomium which would have sat extravagantly on the shoulders of Pico della Mirandola.

Nationalism is the culture of the uncultivated, and they are legion. —MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, CONTRO VIENTO Y MAREA, P. 439

a phrase among the refugees for how they felt about America: Dankbar aber ungülcklich (thankful but unhappy).

Latin America in the late twentieth century was a tragic laboratory for testing all the wrong ways to think about a national culture.

Yonder lies the castle of my father. —TONY CURTIS (ATTRIB.),

Pygmalion: "A comedy about a man who turns a girl into a lady, but in doing so overlooks the woman.

Yonder lies duh castle of my fuddah.