Clive James quotes - page 3

Clive James was an Australian writer, poet, broadcaster, and literary critic, renowned for his wit and insightful commentary. His work spanned television, print, and poetry, gaining him a wide international following. He is remembered for his sharp intellect, humor, and distinctive voice in literary and cultural criticism. Here are 142 of his quotes:

Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn't like the masses: he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts.

Clive James

The Holocaust would have been unimaginable without the Nazi Party; the Nazi Party would have been unimaginable without Hitler; and Hitler's rise to power would have been unimaginable without the unique circumstances that brought the Weimar Republic to ruin. To hear Goldhagen tell it, mass murder was all set to go: a century-long build-up of eliminationist anti-Semitism simply had to express itself. But the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.

Clive James

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. There was a time when I got hot under the collar if the critics said I had nothing new to say. Now I realise that they had a point. My field is the self-evident. Everything I say is obvious, although I like to think that some of the obvious things I have said were not so obvious until I said them.

Clive James

[Mrs Thatcher] started quoting St Francis within minutes of becoming elected, and scarcely an hour had gone by before she was sounding like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.

Clive James

For the educated man, there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of.

Clive James

[In Marcel Ophuls' film The Memory of Justice] Mad old Nazis were to be heard deploring modern decadence. 'The difference is, we weren't obsessed with smut,' said one comfortable, retired SS man, all unaware of being up to his neck in blood and pus.

Clive James

Martin, rather than step into the spotlight, would prefer to die in an unarmed attack on the power station supplying its electric current. His genuine modesty is the main reason for the fateful discrepancy between him and the journalistic literary sexton beetles who make copy out of him: they would like to receive the degree of attention that he would like to avoid, and the clearer it becomes that he would like to avoid it, the more they resent him for failing to appreciate their generosity.

Clive James

The controls fell easily to hand, and from there onto the floor.

Clive James

To me [Sydney Opera House] looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don't waste any time echoing opera houses.

Clive James

The new Germany is a democracy. So was the old Germany, or it tried to be: but then the Nazis got on, and Hell broke loose. It can break loose anywhere: all people have hellish propensities.

Clive James

...that's really the first thing to say about Speer's architecture. It was just awful. A genius without talent, he was essentially a theatrical personality, with enough gumption to be quiet about it.

Clive James

There is abundant evidence in Stoppard's plays to show that he is as capable of emotion as anybody. In Enter A Free Man Linda is a finely tuned moral invention whose equivalents we might well miss in the later plays, if we really thought they should be there. The mainspring of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the perception-surely a compassionate one-that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something which ought to have mattered to Shakespeare.

Clive James

Give or take the odd anatomical discrepancy, John Berger affects me exactly like Jane Fonda - ie. any opinion of mine which I discover he shares I immediately examine to find out what's wrong with it.

Clive James

My idea of a fine wine was one that merely stained your teeth without stripping the enamel.

Clive James

The mad idea that the Jews have no right to exist is a potent intensifier of the almost equally mad idea that the State of Israel can somehow be eliminated. I say 'almost' because a friend of mine in Australia recently presented me with a plausible case that the Middle East would probably be a more peaceful area if the State of Israel had never been founded. Like her argument that the Aborigines would have been a lot happier if the Europeans had never shown up, this contention was hard to rebut, except by rudely pointing out that we were both sitting in an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, history having happened.

Clive James

Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.

Clive James

Since the Nazi era need never have happened, to say that he prophesised it is actually a belittlement of his creative achievement, and only one step up from saying that he caused the whole thing. But nobody could now read The Trial without thinking of the Soviet show trials, or the short works Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony without thinking of the death camps.

Clive James

A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say.

Clive James

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 the 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.

Clive James

I still haven't forgiven C. S. Lewis for going on all those long walks with J. R. R. Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been ever better if C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia.

Clive James

John Carey, who had once buried The Metropolitan Critic, hailed Unreliable Memoirs as the written equivalent of sliced bread. Instantly I revised my opinion of his critical prowess upwards.

Clive James

Schnabel said that Beethoven's late piano sonatas are music better than could be played. Larkin's best poems are poetry better than can be said, but sayability they sumptuously offer. Larkin demands to be read aloud. His big, intricately formed stanzas, often bridging from one to the next, defeat the single breath but always invite it. As you read, the ideal human voice speaks in your head. It isn't his: as his gramophone records prove, he sounded like someone who expects to be interrupted. It isn't yours, either. It's ours.

Clive James