A Quote by Clive James

A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem?
In my books, there is no 'ugly duckling turning into a beautiful swan' syndrome because if you look at the Hansel and Gretel syndrome, it was a mistake. It wasn't a duckling, it was a cygnet, and that's why it turned into a swan. The duckling should with any luck turn into a nice clucking duck and get on with its life. Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
The thing about how that process works is that it's more about the editing and time for judging the ideas. Most pieces I publish each week have been around for months. This is a response to the beginning of the strip, when I was making them so quickly. I would just conceive a piece, finish it, and then the next day see it in the paper. That was when I was doing dailies four days a week.
How we frame the world - how we talk about it and define it - affects how we see things and how we live.
The biggest problem I had - and the biggest problem teenagers have - is not how they dress, how they look or how they act or talk. It's how they see themselves - their self-esteem. In the tenth grade, I realized I am who I am. I've got big ears and big feet. I can etiher sulk around or I can be happy with who I am. The minute I decided to be confident with who I was, all that other stuff stopped. It's all in the way you carry yourself.
I see a lot of comments on Twitter and stuff about how ugly I am, how bad I am at the drums, how awkward I look, and I'm like, yeah, I agree with most of those things.
How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful, is man!... Midway from nothing to the Deity!
I think anybody that's worked hard and has built something and has been successful can testify to how, you know, how wonderful that was, how wonderful it still is.
Everyone knows how much and how hard we train. If I hope to continue goalkeeping until I am 36 or 37, then you have to think about how I train.
You don’t care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay the doctor if I get sick, and yes I am stupid and bored and weak, but I am still your responsibility.
The only way to know everything is to learn how to think, how to ask questions, how to navigate the world. Students must learn how to teach themselves to use new tools, how to talk to unfamiliar people, and basically how to be brave.
See the minutes, how they run, How many make the hour full complete; How many hours bring about the day; How many days will finish up the year; How many years a mortal man may live.
You know how sports teach kids teamwork and how to be strong and brave and confident? Improv was my sport. I learned how to not waffle and how to hold a conversation, how to take risks and actually be excited to fail.
We've learned how to destroy, but not to create; how to waste, but not to build; how to kill men, but not how to save them; how to die, but seldom how to live.
What is this land of Instagram, social media? Having a lot of likes and a lot of followers, and getting paid for it? I kind of found it to be really twisted, but then I started to see how it worked, and see how powerful it was, and how impressionable we all are.
It is an incredible thing to see how many crazy things get thrown out that people then often write commentaries about how happy they are or how disappointed they are about something that's completely false. But, it's a lot of noise, frankly.
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