Top 140 Quotes & Sayings by Clive James

A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.

Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.

Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

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

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.

Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right.

Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

Like a Volvo, Bjorn Borg is rugged, has good after-sales service, and is very dull.

As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks

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.

I've only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.

The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) 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.

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.

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.

I actually didn't like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it's fun to talk about. That's one of the real dangers of drugs: they're too much fun to talk about.

Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.

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.

If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.

When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.

In the twelfth century the Basque fishermen of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with the consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view it is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did.

Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.

Experts say men think of sex every 10 seconds... What do they think of in the other nine?

A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.

I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!

In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

An education without a Bible education is no education.

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

When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.

You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.

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.

I try to be specific. One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You'd like to write phrases that people can't forget as soon as they read them.

The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

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.

They had a... dog called Bluey. A know psychopath, Bluey would attack himself if nothing else was available.

Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.

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.

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.

She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.