A Quote by Clive James

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.
I worked very hard to try and figure out what I thought and I believed that we were going to succeed and that revolutions would happen globally and we would be a part of that and we would have then not capitalism. We would have values based on human lives, not profit. We would actually transform the kinds of ways people built love and built community. It was a very shocking thing to me, out of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, to realize that that dream - while I still believed in it - was not going to happen in the way that I had hoped.
It's such hard work doing a musical. I did my first musical last year, performing in The Producers, and it was a big part to suddenly be doing Leo Bloom in that. It's such hard work. It's a proper slog. It became like clocking in. And it's a big factory - you go in, everyone's got their little plot, people are taking in and out of it if they have days off or holidays, and it's just a jigsaw that all works. It always amazes me that this product would happen every night and it was just all these elements coming together in a big machine.
If you had a magic wand today, and you had one wish - to wipe out all the drug dealers, take them all off the streets and put them in jail, no trial, everybody who sold drugs would automatically be convicted. You know what's going to happen? There's going to be new ones. Why? Because the drug users are going to create them.
My work has never been about me, and I've never made a big deal about my race. I've actually tried hard to avoid ever making a big deal out of it and have, instead, simply tried to do good work that matters.
I would do the same thing over again because whatever I did was meant for me to do, you dig what I'm saying? If it wasn't meant for me to do that show and work with Puff [Daddy]then it wouldn't have ever occurred.
'The Sopranos' wardrobe people would sometimes go over there and just grab stuff off the racks, because B&G has that style that never ages. It's like a '50s or '60s style. It fits me well.
I wake up every morning trying to be a new, better person and version of myself. I never try and be the same thing. So that's what's going to be hard for girls to keep up with me, because I'm always ever-evolving my style.
I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.
I'm incredibly proud to have been nominated in the past and it really means a lot to me because I do work very hard when I'm making a film and I do really do absolutely give my all. To get that kind of pat on the back, it's really amazing and also never something that I anticipated would possibly happen to me, ever. So I am very, very proud to have been there before. And, you know, the nice thing about nominations is that, same as awards, no one can actually take them away from you and I'm proud of that.
If you look at the first TV stuff I did years ago, I've a pretty chubby look about me. I went at it quite hard in the gym at the time. If any footage of me ever came out from those days, I would genuinely die. I did step aerobics to lose the weight, and then I literally ran and ran the weight off on a treadmill.
I've always been honest with all my kids. So I - if they did well, they did well. And if they didn't, actually, I asked, did you try your best? And if they tried their best, then, you know, I back out because I expect them to be honest with me or with themselves. And I can't make you go out there and work out hard.
Everybody has questioned my heart, questioned my training ethics, this and that, but I never did something as cowardly as to take any sports-enhancement drug...That's one thing no one can ever say about me, you know? That I was a coward and took sports-enhancement drugs, because I was afraid I was going to get my a** kicked in front of millions of people. So anybody out there who said I never had no heart, at least I wasn't a coward.
Nothing would make me happier if people got curious enough to actually go online to and start looking and researching the Apollo 1 fire... That would be amazing to me if people would actually go through the trouble to figure that stuff out.
I definitely thought the first book was going to be a one-off. I never thought I'd even write a book, not ever having aspired to be a writer. It's something that never occurred to me - a bit like it never occurred to me to play guitar when I was young. I just thought it was out of my league.
...for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:'You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you're going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you.' That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song 'Go get high now' started playing in my head, I was off.
I would never accept a role that wasn't going to stretch me or challenge me in some way. I'd say Holy Smoke! probably did that more than anything I'd ever done. It took me to places I didn't actually know I could go to, and that's what I want my career to be all about.
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