Clive James Quotes

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

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

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

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

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.

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

Democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides.

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.

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.

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.

Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.

When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

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

A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

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.

Finally you get to the age when a book’s power to make you think becomes the first thing you notice about it.

Some people are different, and so are the rest of us.

If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.

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.

The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant.

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

Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.

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.

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?

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.

Books are the anchors Left by the ships that rot away.

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.

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.

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.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out

Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence. —JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL,

Socrates, after all, said that the unexamined life was not worth living. He might have added, however, that continual self-examination would leave us no time to live.

Why should I waste my imagination on myself? —SERGEI DIAGHILEV

A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

if you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line.

a poem is never finished, only abandoned,

he took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as practised by Clive James, Gore Vidal, and Michael Foot.

As the late Edward W Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, ‘Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism.’ I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can’t be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized.

In the words of the artist-critic 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. Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.

The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power.

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL

Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring.

Stefan George: “He looks like an old woman who looks like an old man.

Aron’s conclusion was an epigram: “Peace impossible, war unlikely.

And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days. —DRIEU LA ROCHELLE,

Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. —COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.):

What do you mean, speak louder? If I could speak louder, I wouldn’t need a telephone.

Man and Superman: “the audience gets an exhausting idea of the inexhaustibility of the subject, and is bored brilliantly.

There are no genres, there are only talents. —JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, LE VOLEUR DANS LA MAISON VIDE, P. 311

bohemian’s ability not to worry about money always starts with your money rather than his.)

Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world.

history is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.

That amazing thing doesn’t need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.

He can do phrases that pull you in like an Inuit fisherman whose hook is suddenly taken by a killer whale...

The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivation. Deprived I never felt.

Funny Debates at both Cambridge and Oxford eventually helped to convince me that the only place to be amusing is in a serious context.

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

Men ought to treat with caution those that clarify the deed by seeing deep into the thought that lies behind it.

I should have been more careful To remember everything I could go on, except I can't

One parent is enough to spoil you but discipline takes two. I got too much of what I wanted and not enough of what I needed.

Orpheus, with immaculately cut pleated trousers instead of a toga, was played by Jean Marais, Cocteau’s young lover. The leading actress, Maria Casares, was Albert Camus’s mistress.

Communist interpretation is never wrong. Logicians will object in vain that a theory which exempts itself from all refutations escapes from the order of truth. —RAYMOND ARON, L’OPIUM

I had to leave Paris the next morning. As always I would wonder why and start counting the days before I could go back. And then lose count and be lost again in the life that, by some strange twist of fate, I lived somewhere else. Au revoir Paris. Bonjour tristesse.

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.

In those days you matched a block of balsa against a rudimentary diagram and got going with a razor blade, which sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa. If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognizable as a thumb, you were a genius.

the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state. —RAYMOND ARON, L’OPIUM

But caveat lector: life is waiting, and to read about someone who writes about life is getting far from it. Reading Schopenhauer when he tells you to watch out for reading too many books is already getting far from it, and at this moment you are reading someone who is telling you about how Schopenhauer said that you should not let reading come between you and life. In philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality.

...and in the spell Of Proust's great paragraphs we hear and see The ocean into which we all, as he did, Must sink back, our achievements left behind – Whether a necessary task fulfilled Or else whole symphonies – and be reclaimed By nature, which has no mind of its own But simply makes us welcome, as the ashes Of Maria Callas, spread on the Agean, Were first a cloud, and then a mist, then nothing But an everlasting song reduced to atoms Which, though they drift apart, are still together In the memories of those of us who live.

No matter how often you come back to Paris, if you go away that first time, you leave behind the life you might have led there, the man you might have been, the essays you might have written at the cafe tables, the manifestos you might have signed, the mastery you might have obtained over the French language and Paris taxi drivers. You might have risen high in French politics, romanced Ines de la Fressange from the top of a ladder, hatched a plan to fill in the Arc de Triomphe with a split level shopping mall, been run down in the Boulevard Saint-Germain by Françoise Sagan, buried in Père Lachaise and Natalie might have been your daughter. I can't imagine a more satisfactory life.

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked By various diseases of the intellect Or failing body. How am I still upright? And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night. How did it come to this? How else but through The course of years, and what its workings do To wood, stone, glass and almost all the metals, Smouldering already in the fresh rose petals. Our energy deceived us. Blessed with the knack To get things done, we thought to get it back Each time we lost it, just by taking breath — And some of us are racing yet as we face death. Well, good to see you. Sorry I have to fly. I’m struggling with a deadline, God knows why, And ghosts keep interrupting. Think of me The way I do of you. Quite often. Constantly.

I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.

The whole world, if you wait long enough Is full of falling.

The guards made a cursory inspection of the boat, and had no desire to stain their starched and neatly pressed uniforms in the engine room after seeing Giordino looking like James Dean after the oil well came in in Giant.

Such moments from Bayley prove that the knack for paradox should always be set to fire single shots, and never switched to automatic. His indulgence of it, mercifully infrequent, is the only way he ever reminds you of those desperate commentators, omnipresent now in our multiple media outlets, who must always advance an outlandish opinion because they don't write well enough to make a reasonable opinion interesting.

Art, by making bearable sense of the world, is out after religion's job, which is probably why no religion in its fundamentalist phase has ever liked it. Art is its own ideal state, which is probably why Plato didn't like it either.

The Random Book Club is an offshoot of the shop which I set up a few years ago when business was sore and the future looked bleak. For £59 a year subscribers receive a book a month, but they have no say over what genre of book they receive, and quality control is entirely down to me. I am extremely judicious in what I choose to put in the box from which the RBC books are parcelled and sent. Since subscribers are clearly inveterate readers, I always take care to pick books that I think anyone who loves reading for its own sake would enjoy. There is nothing that would require too much technical expertise to understand: a mix of fiction and non-fiction, with the weight slightly towards non-fiction, and some poetry. Among the books going out later this month are a copy of Clive James’s Other Passports, Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell, Iris Murdoch’s biography of Sartre, Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice, and a book called 100+ Principles of Genetics. All the books are in good condition, none is ex-library, and some – several of them each year – are hundreds of years old. I estimate that if the members decided to sell the books on eBay, they would more than make their money back. There is a forum on the web site, but nobody uses it, which gives me an insight into the type of person who is attracted to the idea – they don’t like clubs where they have to interact with other people. Perhaps that is why I came up with the idea in the first place – it is a sort of Groucho Marx approach to clubs. There are about 150 members and, apart from a minimal amount of advertising in the Literary Review, the only marketing I do is to have a web site and Facebook page, neither of which I have updated for some time. Word of mouth seems to have been the best way of marketing it. It has saved me from financial embarrassment during a very difficult time in the book trade.

Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers — he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals.

a phrase among the refugees for how they felt about America: Dankbar aber ungülcklich (thankful but unhappy).

Peacock in real life undid Shelley’s vegetarianism by waving a steak under his nose when he fainted,

Eban said of Yasser Arafat that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that.

the failed states in Latin America needed double-entry bookkeeping more than they needed any ideology,

He has always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how they would have done it.

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) was the man who defined the Communist world as the first society in history condemned to live behind walls in order to stop people getting out.

In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

Liberals and humanists are always saying that art is the soul of truth.

more typical essay is the one on Karl Kraus, of which Kraus confessed that the only thing he understood was that it was about him.

To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. —EDWARD GIBBON,

Yonder lies the castle of my father. —TONY CURTIS (ATTRIB.),

Hitler wouldn’t have needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.

Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy—the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate—requires effort and character. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Too many milieux injure an adaptable sensibility. There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue. —JEAN COCTEAU, LE POTOMAK

Cocteau thought of his own images. He really was as innovative as his admirers said. Their only mistake was to imagine that novelty was an ethos.

Isn’t a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a form of therapy?

Pygmalion: “A comedy about a man who turns a girl into a lady, but in doing so overlooks the woman.

Of a young actress: “She is pretty, and tactfully concerned that the optical pleasure she provides shall not be disturbed by technical requirements any more than necessary.

(The poverty of his son has diminished, apparently, but we are assured that Annan had no direct responsibility for that.)

when virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence.

The more nobly behaved the family, the less chance it stood.