Clive James > Quotes

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.”
― Clive James

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
― Clive James

“She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.”
― Clive James

“If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
― Clive James

“All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.”
― Clive James

“There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.”
― Clive James

“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.”
― Clive James, May Week Was in June

“Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”
― Clive James

“Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides.”
― Clive James

“Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.”
― Clive James

“Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.”
― Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs

“When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
― Clive James

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”
― Clive James

“It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so.”
― Clive James

“Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.”
― Clive James, Falling Towards England

“Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.”
― Clive James, Latest Readings

“Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It’s got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side. I’ve had everything hurled at me, especially in Australia. Australia is where the tough journalists are.”
― Clive James

“The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
― Clive James, Latest Readings

“Nowadays you have to go pretty far south in Italy before you encounter the widespread belief that any foreign girl is a whore unless her father and two brothers drive her around in an armoured car.”
― Clive James, Falling Towards England

“The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew.”
― Clive James

“Devotees who say that À la recherche du temps perdu reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?”
― Clive James

“Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.”
― Clive James, At the Pillars of Hercules

“It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“We are often told that the next generation of literati won't have private libraries: everything will be in the computer. It's a rational solution, but that's probably what's wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.”
― Clive James, Latest Readings

“The childish urge to understand everything doesn't necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.”
― Clive James