Clive James Quotes

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

Snooker is just chess with balls.

The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB

A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn't

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

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

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

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

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

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

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

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.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

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.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

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.

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

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

On the correctly formed pubescent girl, a Speedo looked wonderful. When it was wet, it was an incitement to riot.

Visitors who come from the Soviet Union and tell you how marvelous it is to be able to look at public buildings without advertisements stuck all over them are just telling you that they can't decipher the cyrillic alphabet.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.

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.

The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.

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?

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

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.

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.