230 Quotes by Clive James

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

The inevitable effect of a biographer’s hindsight is to belittle the subject’s foresight.

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.

Delivering the State of the Union? That bloke couldn’t deliver pizza.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts...

You can’t be young always. The day will come when everything will fall apart.

If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they’re forty.

It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.