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
nhs worry classic
One of the virtues of the NHS... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it.
beautiful men italian
My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast.
running people towers
The repeat run of Fawlty Towers drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of The Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.
soup stones classic
The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.
believe mind fundamentals
I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.
men italian wife
The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.
thinking dallas classic
A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't
fate world egomaniacs
I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.
australia wonderful missions
It's my mission to tell the Australians from abroad in my work that Australia is a wonderful place.
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.
funny dog psychopath
They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.
drug style going-out
I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.
hindsight inevitable belittle
The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.