Clive James
Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.Collection: Graduation
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.Collection: Humor
It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.Collection: Technology
A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.
Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right.
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Disco dancing is just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail.
Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.Collection: Moving
Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.Collection: Looks
Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.Collection: Funny Inspirational
Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.Collection: Eye
Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.Collection: Triumph
All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.Collection: Light
Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.Collection: Artist
The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.Collection: Teaching
The Benson and Hedges Cup was won by McEnroe ... he was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread.Collection: Mean
Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.Collection: Sick
An education without a Bible education is no education.Collection: Classic
All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.Collection: Intellectual
As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunksCollection: Wisdom
I saw the film Pearl Harbour and it made me wish that the Japanese had bombed Hollywood instead!Collection: Wish
If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.Collection: Memories
When I was young I never believed that Australia was anything else except blessed. I thought it was a little dull when I was young, but that was 'cause I was a snob.Collection: Blessed
When I finally embraced abstinence it was because of the simple urge to work a longer day. Thus, without joining Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at last able to leave Piss-Artists Notorious.Collection: Funny
I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.Collection: Believe
A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.Collection: Play
Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.Collection: Kitchen
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.Collection: Writing
John McEnroe has hair like badly turned broccoli.Collection: Hair
Sometimes I feel if I was young again, I would wrap a bandana around my head like Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and I would become a pirate of the Web. And I would go around stealing poems and assembling into one spot like a treasure cave.Collection: Pirate
The secret for an artist is to make that a subject and not bang your head against the wall and give up. But to turn it into and treat the new subject matter, which is one's own vanishing.Collection: Giving Up
Young men especially - I don't know if young women feel much the same - but young men think they are immortal, automatically. They have no idea of time because they have so much energy and I was like that.Collection: Men
In between the Queen and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, sat Tony Richardson, looking very calm. Later on it emerged that this was because, having not been apprised of the placement until he was about to sit down, he had died of fright. To have expired was to be fortunate.Collection: Queens
Snooker is just chess with balls.Collection: Balls
Being young is wonderful. But one of the secrets of being a human individual - a mature human individual shall we put it rather grandly - is that you can see this desire in perspective.Collection: Perspective
A sceptic finds Dallas absurd. A cynic thinks the public doesn'tCollection: Thinking
In the movies first impressions are everything. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right.Collection: Giving
How much atonement is enough? The bombing must be allowed as at least part-payment: those of our young people who are concerned about the moral problem posed by the Allied air offensive should at least consider the moral problem that would have been posed if the German civilian population had not suffered at all.Collection: Peace
My niece is - her name is Sasha, is currently learning Russian at Melbourne University and I look forward to the day when I can talk to her about Pushkin.Collection: Niece
I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.Collection: Book
I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.Collection: Missing
The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.Collection: Country
You can never get a woman to sit down and listen to a drum solo.Collection: Women
I was a big pothead for a short period. That was what ticked me off that I shouldn't go near hard drugs, actually, because I would consume the stuff as if it was going out of style and it rapidly occurred to me that if I ever tried a hard drug, the same thing would happen, so I never did.Collection: Drug
Spending all my remaining money on a ticket to Florence was rendered needlessly complicated by the fact that none of the ticket-sellers had ever heard of the place. At last their supervisor showed up and set them straight by informing them that the city they had always referred to as 'Firenze' was in reality called Florence.Collection: Funny
She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.Collection: Reason
Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.Collection: Grateful