Clive James

Quotes

1. 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.

   p. 18

2. 

   I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was.

   p. 127

3. 

   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.

   p. 241

4. 

   On the surface of the water, a midge vanishes into a hungry ripple. I'm not ready yet. He wonders why, at his age and having come so far, he still feels that. The culmination of his luck is that he will never feel any other way.

   p. 240

5. 

   It just never occurred to me that the real distance I would have to cross would be in my own mind. In that respect, I had flown half a million miles before I moved an inch, and these three volumes are just the rattling the side of my cot made when I climbed over, on the first stage of that long, momentous journey across the carpet, towards the light of the open door.

   p. 249

6. 

   I should say in haste that his early poetry gave him the right to think of himself as a giant. But he was also a nutter, one of the manic-depressive type who, when in a downhill phase, accuse themselves loudly of being Hitler. (They never accuse themselves of being the seventh anonymous stormtrooper from the right at a dedication ceremony for the new blood banner in a provincial town twenty miles from Dortmund: they always accuse themselves of being Hitler, just as the people who had previous lives in ancient Egypt always turn out to have been pharaohs or chief priests, and never night-shift workers on the crew that put up the third tallest obelisk in one of the satellite temples at Karnak).

   p. 181

7. 

   His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral.

   p. 19

8. 

   If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don't go in.

   p. 166

9. 

   The professor was a bore on a Guggenheim, a long-range drone, and international ballistic fossil. I spent the whole hour drawing little pictures of hanged men.

   p. 120

10. 

    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.

    p. 205

11. 

    Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.

    p. 165

12. 

    The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can't tolerate having strong men around him.

    p. 126