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.

— Clive James

Clive James Quotes

A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.

— Clive James

Socrates, after all, said that the unexamined life was not worth living. He might have added, however, that continual self-examination would leave us no time to live.

— Clive James

In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.

— Clive James

To die guessing that you will be forgotten is one thing. But what would it be like to know that you have been forgotten before you die?

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

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.

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

Orpheus, with immaculately cut pleated trousers instead of a toga, was played by Jean Marais, Cocteau’s young lover. The leading actress, Maria Casares, was Albert Camus’s mistress.

— Clive James

Stefan George: “He looks like an old woman who looks like an old man.

— Clive James

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

— Clive James

Men ought to treat with caution those that clarify the deed by seeing deep into the thought that lies behind it.

— Clive James

Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world.

— Clive James

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.

— Clive James

The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power.

— Clive James

What do you mean, speak louder? If I could speak louder, I wouldn’t need a telephone.

— Clive James

One parent is enough to spoil you but discipline takes two. I got too much of what I wanted and not enough of what I needed.

— Clive James

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

— 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.

— Clive James
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