230 Quotes by Clive James

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.

Man and Superman: “the audience gets an exhausting idea of the inexhaustibility of the subject, and is bored brilliantly.

Pound had argued – and Eliot had helped him prove – that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.

Men never sound more stupid than when they’re telling you they’re a very complex personality.

He can do phrases that pull you in like an Inuit fisherman whose hook is suddenly taken by a killer whale...

Aron’s conclusion was an epigram: “Peace impossible, war unlikely.

I’ve got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

Little books are the things to write at my age, I’ve decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant.