Quotes from Clive James

Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy—the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate—requires effort and character. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Cambridge will probably never get round to formally approving homosexuality, but the type of homosexual involved perhaps prefers a blind eye

Early in the twentieth century, E.E.Cummings was as hot against materialist society as only a poet living on a trust fund can be.

The clavadista checks the tower On the cliffs from which he dives Turning two thirds of the way down To mark the point Where all the somersaults are over And he must go in feet first or else break

Of a young actress: "She is pretty, and tactfully concerned that the optical pleasure she provides shall not be disturbed by technical requirements any more than necessary.

Of a bad playwright: "Saying nothing is the mother tongue of his art.

Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don't dare to express it. —SOPHIE SCHOLL AT THE WHITE ROSE TRIAL IN MUNICH, QUOTED BY RICHARD HANSER IN DEUTSCHLAND ZULIEBE (FOR THE SAKE OF GERMANY), P. 15

I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than one sense of the term, an émigré. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, VARIA, VOL. 1, P. 203

Polgar's praise for his brains: "High intelligence, from which the blessing of refreshing words falls in a shower, offers here a rich substitute for art.

Sartre's existentialism, where it essentially means having the chutzpah to do what it takes so that you may suit yourself—not quite the same thing as being true to yourself.)

Raised in the hot sun, my idea of romance was to feel cold. North was a thrilling word to me. Balzac said that a novel should send the reader into another country. My dreams were like that. They still are.

Until the end of World War II, Argentina and Australia were running in parallel.

Today, they separately demonstrate what a luxury it is to be a stable, prosperous, democratic nation with a dependable constitution.

Australia is all that and more, and Argentina, after yet another implosion of the civil order, is once again none of it and less.

It is isn't easy to make someone who hasn't experienced it understand what it feels like, this martyrdom of being judged, devalued, disqualified, and misrepresented by journalists writing in haste who are bored by reading and who, for that matter, hardly ever read anything anyway. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.

Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty—it makes them indispensable—

Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Her novels, which I have not yet read, are usually described as the work of a writer's writer, or perhaps of someone who has been to the Institute for the Theory of Literature in Zagreb.

sat transfixed by the rhythm of that voice – the strong view lightly stated. It wasn't words plus pictures.

He committed suicide in 1794 because the Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine.

Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)

he saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse.

when virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence.