230 Quotes by Clive James

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.

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

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.

The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that’s why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.

I’m certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can’t really speak them. I couldn’t have stayed out of jail in most of them.

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

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.

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

It’s a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don’t think I’m interested in any discussion about whether I’m a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.