Now that rain has stopped play at Seddon Park, let me share some of my favourite Clive James quotes:
From The Meaning of Recognition – New Essays 2001-2005:
“ ... she was talking too fast to hear herself think.”
“... there is a lingering aesthetic sense that appreciates a tall, slim female form draped in a black linen pants suit underpinned with strappy high-heeled sandals for the shapely feet, the toenails painted with the blood of slain lovers.”
“The concept was too subtle for her to grasp. It turned out that she was a lawyer. She can attack me as often as she likes, but I hope to God that she never defends me.”
“Those of us who have lost our hair find it hard to suppress the suspicion that it has been stolen in the night by those who have kept theirs.”
“... I found Moby Dick a hard read ...”.
“... academic politics in all their bitchy intricacy ...”.
“... you have to admire a country so democratic that a mentally handicapped man can become President.”
“As all you women in the audience know, the amount of hair on top of a mature man’s head is governed by the amount of testosterone he secretes, but the proportion is not direct. The proportion is inverse. Testosterone attacks the hair follicles. It fries and shrivels them like noodles in a wok of acid.”
From Cultural Amnesia:
“One famous compulsive fabulist, the Jeffrey Archer of his time, never recovered what was left of his credibility after Molnár said: ‘He’s such a liar that not even the opposite is true’.”
“As I write, the elite is in its last phase, where it begins to forget the car keys through the effort of remembering the door keys.”
“The hardest trick in an Italian poet’s book is to avoid rhyme ...”.
“He was the sort of writer who said ‘microphone’ when he meant ‘loudspeaker.’”
“... I became a scolding bore on the subject of the Cinquecento. On the Quattrocento, less hindered by academic assistance, I was capable of the odd independent judgement ...”.
“... a shock, as if Jane Austin had forgotten to mention money.”
“Written in an age when it was still assumed that children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand ...”.
“... the flouncing kick-line of the post-modern intellectual cabaret.”
“Expressing oneself clearly is the most complicated thing there is.”
“Like literary theory at a later time, however, analytical philosophy was a hard game to get out of after you had started drawing the salary.”
