Clive James Unreliable Memoirs Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

inspection of kit, dress and rifle

Until then, most of my poems had been devotedly incomprehensible. Now they were becoming comprehensible, a transformation that would have allowed me to detect their sentimentality if they had not been so true to my feelings, which were sentimental.

George Russell had responded to yet another request for a reference, sending, by return air-letter, an encomium which would have sat extravagantly on the shoulders of Pico della Mirandola.

row of damaged books which Davenport had failed to return to the London Library.

Raised in the hot sun, my idea of romance was to feel cold. North was a thrilling word to me. Balzac said that a novel should send the reader into another country. My dreams were like that. They still are.

I had landed in the lap of the only kind of luxury I have ever cared about – a wealth of opportunity.

In the Italian galleries even the guides regularly fingered the paint surface.

The pasta was always al dente, an expression which could be pressed into service as the name of a ferocious gangster.

Noël Coward’s comment about the secret of success being the capacity to survive failure.

Out of nowhere, our problem was solved. We had a stringer in New York whose life was spent collecting awful things for us off the cable channels: biker astrologists, transvestite psychics, body-building sexologists, stuff like that. He lived in a cold-water flat somewhere on the Upper West Side dodging cockroaches the size of rats while he survived on pizza. One night he was watching a cable channel unbelievably called Channel 69. Exercising their rights under the First Amendment, anyone at all could pay ten dollars and go on Channel 69 to do a number, because in America everyone is entitled to self-expression: it’s in the Constitution. Our stringer was halfway though a five-cheese pizza with extra cheese when he was suddenly face to face with an Hispanic woman in a green feather boa singing the Lionel Ritchie hit ‘Hello’ while she pounded away at a Yamaha portable piano. He had never seen anything like her in his life and for a while he thought there might be something wrong with the pizza, but when he recovered his mind he sent me a video by courier. The video had the artist’s name handwritten on the label. It was Margarita Pracatan.

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

matched pair of Purdey shot-guns, one of which had not been fired,

When the cover was lifted to reveal nothing but a heaped plate of pineapple chunks, however, there were people in the audience who could take no more.

and Cate Blanchett in the same kitchen, for a cup of tea and a chat. The post-war Australian expatriates were looked at with suspicion by their countrymen early on. Later, they got too much favour. My own view is that, of those among us who sailed away to England in the early 1960s, those who soon sailed back again did best. This especially applied to the theatre. In earlier times, a long and powerfully

the application of effort should always be exactly measured: nothing by force, everything by logical progression.

The middle of the sentence had already left the beginning of the sentence lost in the distance, and the end of the sentence was slower to arrive than a school holiday.

To put it briefly, the secret is to put it briefly. But you always think that’s what you’re doing, until experience teaches you that you aren’t being brief enough.

Nationalism, as a state of mind, is all fervour and no judgement. National pride, however, is a different and better thing.

even today, when I have a cold, it is the worst cold in the history of the house.

If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don’t go in. Even when working with a whole heart, you are bound to have the occasional failure, and sometimes the whole heart will be the reason: caring too much can make you try too hard, and what should have sung will merely simper. But to work with half a heart means failure every time, and the results will scream the place down.

Chesterton once said, on the subject of innate human dignity, that it all depended on the presence of the holy spirit, and that it was otherwise hard to take the human body seriously, belonging as it did to a creature that nourished itself by pushing food into a hole at the bottom of its face.

I still get so impatient with the whole time-consuming business of covering up exposed skin that I will buy the first thing that catches my eye, and that when it comes to shoes the first thing that catches your eye is the last thing you should ever put on your feet.

He knew where to drop the needle – an especially important qualification in the matter of Wagner, with whom it is an invariable rule that the most immediately accessible bits are never at the edge of the disc.

Then I lifted my arms to adjust the mirror, and discovered that I couldn’t see. The shoulders of the jacket had immediately risen to engulf my head. When I put my arms back down, vision returned. Perhaps I had just moved too suddenly. Tentatively I lifted my right arm. The right shoulder of the jacket went up past my ear. Ditto for the left side. Even more slowly I lifted both arms. Blackout. There was no spare cloth in the armpits: the gussets, or whatever they were called, were missing.

in those days I construed absence of explicit opposition as a whole-hearted endorsement.

Dining out meant shepherd’s pie and bitter at the Anchor, Bankside. The Anchor was a little sooty brick Georgian pub on the Embankment.

sat transfixed by the rhythm of that voice – the strong view lightly stated. It wasn’t words plus pictures.

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

Asking you to play someone you’re not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata.

We made our first private-life contact not at Harmondsworth or in the Kombibus but at the London Library in St James’s Square.

Cambridge will probably never get round to formally approving homosexuality, but the type of homosexual involved perhaps prefers a blind eye

I forgave them, having surmised – correctly, as it turned out – that America was merely first in achieving a level of average income so high that even the mentally underprivileged were able to travel, and that shortly all the other industrialised countries would start exporting idiots too.