230 Quotes by Clive James

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

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

Isn't a blank verse paragraph just a chunk of prose bent around corners after every five beats? Try doing that and you'll not only get lines that don't scan, you'll also get, and all too often, the one effect that you definitely don't want: successive lines that rhyme.

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

It is a sad farewell. You loved it all.You dream that you might keep it in your headBut memories, where can you take them to?Take one last look at them. They end with you.

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

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

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.

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there