Clive James
Clive James
Clive James AO CBEis an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism. He has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1962...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionMemoirist
Date of Birth7 October 1939
CountryAustralia
Clive James quotes about
writing important age
This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.
water verbs tails
Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.
unions classic blokes
Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn't deliver pizza.
sports men thinking
It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane.
men thinking ideas
Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.
kitchen amy classic
Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.
sex men thinking
Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
beautiful sun classic
She wasn't just beautiful. She was like the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had just remembered something funny.
reading writing interesting
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.
funeral black gowns
His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.
humorous beer mcdonalds
In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.
moving wrecks woods
The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.
funny cutting shoes
When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog.
firsts life-is drains
I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.