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
tennis looks building
John McEnroe looks as if he is serving round the edge of an imaginary building.
hair tennis broccoli
John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.
tennis dull borg
Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.
sex men thinking
Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?
pirate caves treasure
Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.
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.
curves tennis balls
Jimmy Connors likes the ball to come at him in a straight line, so that he can hit it back in another straight line. When it comes to him in a curve, he uses up half of his energy straightening it up again.
memories civilization age
If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
writing people too-much
People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
looks schwarzenegger condom
Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts....
mahler never-trust should
You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.
war air people
How much atonement is enough? The bombing must be allowed as at least part-payment: those of our young people who are concerned about the moral problem posed by the Allied air offensive should at least consider the moral problem that would have been posed if the German civilian population had not suffered at all.
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.
butterfly fighting keys
The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.